Release Date: 9/1/2009
Publisher: DAW Books
The world of Faerie never disappeared: it merely went into hiding, continuing to exist parallel to our own. Secrecy is the key to Faerie's survival—but no secret can be kept forever, and when the fae and mortal worlds collide, changelings are born. Half-human, half-fae, outsiders from birth, these second-class children of Faerie spend their lives fighting for the respect of their immortal relations. Or, in the case of October "Toby" Daye, rejecting it completely. After getting burned by both sides of her heritage, Toby has denied the fae world, retreating into a "normal" life. Unfortunately for her, Faerie has other ideas.
The murder of Countess Evening Winterrose, one of the secret regents of the San Francisco Bay Area, pulls Toby back into the fae world. Unable to resist Evening's dying curse, which binds her to investigate, Toby is forced to resume her old position as knight errant to the Duke of Shadowed Hills and begin renewing old alliances that may prove her only hope of solving the mystery...before the curse catches up with her.
In October Daye's world all she wants to forget is the Faerie world, to isolate herself and never return. Too bad life is never easy, especially for Toby. After spending over a decade missing she now finds herself being sucked back in, because now her life depends on it.
Toby struck me as such a strong character, but at the same time she's at her weakest. What she's gone through in the last 14 years has left her vulnerable, scared and alone. But now being bound to find a killer that is using iron to kill, and thugs to do the dirty work, that's just icing on the cake. She might only be half Fae, which means her magic is weak, but she'll have to pull every trick in her small book to figure this mystery out. Sneaking her way into the crime scene Toby is able to use blood magic to relive the few final moments of her friends life, seeing things that will help piece together why someone would go to such an extreme to murder a Fae. There's a high price for blood magic and Toby knows this, but the direction that it sends her in is one that she's more afraid of then any other.
Suddenly she finds herself going Home, and I'm not talking a cozy cottage where she'll have tea with her mom, I'm talking the place that changelings (half breed Fae), go when they have no where else to turn. It's the one place she told herself she would never go back to. Yet now here she is selling basically her soul for answers and leads. Not to mention the emotional turmoil that she has even looking at the place, and it's so not what she wants in the middle of a murder case. Yes returning Home was hard, but Toby now has to face old demons and return to the people she let down over a decade ago. Coming down to the wire Toby MUST piece this puzzle together or Winterrose's curse will take her under. Yet threw gun chases, ambushes, doppelganger look-a-likes, then more twists & turns then I can name, the ride that Toby is on makes this one hell of a book! The detail that the characters posses, from looks to personality traits, makes Rosemary and Rue unlike any other book I've come across.
Couldn't put this book down!
There are books that I get into, then there are books that I completely and utterly fall in love with. They're the ones that leave me buzzing for days afterward, with the inability to focus on another book. It's like a really good high....and it's totally legal. This was a book that left me felling giddy, excited, and wanting to run out to the book store in the middle of the night just to get the next one in the series! If you don't own this book, buy it, borrow it, sell your first born to get a copy if you have to, because it's just the beginning of a series that promises nothing but sheer awesomeness in the future!
5/5
