Review of Magic Bites and Magic Burns

I read these books in a couple of hours apiece! They were not the most challenging reads, but they were fun, and they kept me entertained. I liked the first one slightly better than the second.

The premise is that the main character, Kate, my usual badass heroine, is a mercenary living in Atlanta...but some alternate Atlanta where magic and technology trade off in waves. Either the tech is up or the magic is. It's hard to explain, but is interesting to read about. Actually one of the things I liked about these books was the "show, don't tell" approach...there wasn't a lot of spoon feeding about the world's background, just enough to keep things from being totally confusing.

Kate is not only skilled with her sword but is also adept at magic...and she keeps hinting at her paternity (the hints were so forceful in the second book you'd have to be really dense not to guess who her dad is...that was a little disappointing). In Magic Bites, Kate takes an assignment to find out who killed her guardian and ends up working with vampires, shapeshifters, and all sorts of other (typical urban fantasy) creatures. The vampires in these novels are interesting--they are mindless undead, sort of like zombies, who have to be piloted by another person. In the second book, Kate starts by looking for a young girl's missing mother and ends up uncovering a coven of witches who have inadvertently let something really nasty loose.

I'm looking forward to reading the third in the series as soon as it's available at the library--these books are fun. Hopefully the third is as good as the first was.