Saturday 24 November 2012

Guest Review: Prey (Shifters #4)

Sarah, my guest reviewer is stopping by with another review for us today!

Prey (Shifters #4)
- Rachel Vincent

Publisher: MIRA

Sometimes playing cat and mouse is no game...Play? "Right." My Pride is under fire from all sides, my father's authority is in question and my lover is in exile. Which means I haven't laid eyes on Marc's gorgeous face in months. And with a new mother "and" an I-know-everything teenager under my protection, I don't exactly have time to fantasize about ever seeing him again. Then our long-awaited reunion is ruined by a vicious ambush by strays. Now our group is under attack, Marc is missing and I will need every bit of skill and smarts to keep my family from being torn apart. Forever.

Hello all.  Ah, we are rapidly approaching the most AMAZING time of year, one I literally use the other 11 months of the year to plan for.  I am therefore reading a lot of Christmas-based fiction / non-fiction at the mo, just to ramp up my excitement levels to the cusp of a mental meltdown.  However, I am still finding time for plenty of fantasy reading, starting with Rachel Vincent’s Prey, the fourth in the UF Faythe Sanders series. 

Faythe, to those of you who haven’t met her yet, is a sassy, mouthy, fiercely loyal werecat, with a penchant for allowing situations to run away with her without stopping to think of the consequences.  This character trait in particular leads her to some dark and dangerous places, especially as in Prey her entire Pride is separated, threatened and undermined.  She continues to mature and grow into her role though, a process that Rachel Vincent is carefully crafting as the series progresses.  Her interactions with a willful, hormonal and stressed teenager in particular offer amusing reading when compared to the Faythe from book 1.

Prey does take a long while to really get going though, and does suffer somewhat from its own version of ‘middle part of a trilogy syndrome’.  It is obviously setting the scene for the rest of the series, and will no doubt become a vitally important read in that respect, but to me this does mean that the pace does become rather pedestrian at times.  There is also an awful lot of discussion on food and coffee consumption, which I did find grating after a while.

All in all Prey is a must-read if you’re following the series, but not a great standalone novel.  One for fans of Kelley Armstrong and Patricia Briggs, 7.5 out of 10.

1 comment:

  1. I do believe this is the one I still need to read. I'm pretty sure I've read the third. Yea, I'm organized like that. I can see why some of the redundancy would get on your nerves, but I do love this series and so I know I'll be reading this one too. Glad you did enjoy it.

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