Read Recently -- April
Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn
Kitty Norville is a radio DJ, lately taking the midnight to 4 AM shift in a Denver station. One evening, while waiting for someone to call and request something decent (recorded before 1990, she says), she pulls out the latest copy of the Weekly World News and starts discussing Batboy. Someone calls in and suggests that Batboy is really a vampire, you know, hiding in plain sight. The next caller wants to talk about werewolves. And presto they're off to the races, and Kitty has a hit radio program on her hands. Next up is syndication. People want to call in and talk about the supernatural, and some are claiming to be vampires, or their human servants, or wannabes, or werewolves, or their spouses, and the like. This is problematic for Kitty because, well, she is a werewolf. And her pack Alpha doesn't want her doing the show.
The Alpha, in fact, has a rather creepy relationship with Kitty. He keeps her in a juvenile position in the pack; a cub; a dependant, so that he can have sex with her whenever he wants without her resisting or challenging him. When this point came up about 30 pages into the book, I very nearly put it down right there and walked away from it. I'm glad I didn't, though, because a big part of the story is Kitty's growth in the pack and the world. Her only friend in the pack is TJ, a gay man who acts as a kind of big brother figure for her.
As the show begins gaining fame, the local vampire leader demands that Kitty's Alpha order her to shut the show down. She convinces him not to by bribing him with a share of the profits.
Kitty is outed on the air when someone hires a bounty hunter/werewolf hunter/vampire hiunter named Cormac to kill her on the air. She manages to convince Cormac that she doesn't deserve to die and that he's being used; she lives, but she's no longer a secret. And when the police discover a series of murders that seem to have been done by a werewolf, they come after Kitty for an expert opinion. And this just drags her further into the spotlight, and into greater conflict with her pack. And there is the disturbingly attractive Cormac . . . .
This is a light read, but I was pleased with it. It avoids all the problems I had with Bitten, and Kitty doesn't seem at all Sue-ish. And while there is some sex, there is no romance (or rather, no Romance!), so I have no complaints.
Recommended. (PS--for some interesting thoughts on this sort of story, check out cristalia here. About third from the bottom in the comment tree I asked her opinon of this series. The answer is useful).
The Big Knockover: selected stories and short novels nby Dashiell Hammett; edited and with an introduction by Lillian Hellman
The Continental Op is one of the more interesting of the hardboiled detective characters; a short, fat little man with no name that we are ever told, he alternates fast-talk, brains and toughness to get him through his cases (which, I guess, makes him a typical Hammett hero, when you get right down to it). This collection is mostly stories about him (though the story "Tulip" seems to be a semi-autobiographical story about Hammett himself, abandoned and never finished). What I found interesting was that some of the stories read like models for recent Robert B. Parker novels (which is not surprising; Hammett is one of the writers Parker modelled his style on). Anyway, it's a fun read and recommended for fans of the hardboiled stuff.