The cover of this book caught my eye. First the title, and then the illustration of the main character, AnnaBelle Lee, with her red hair and witchy cat at her feet. The background was illuminated red swamp. I was sold. Thankfully, this was at the library, so I could just borrow it.
The cover promised that its contents "sizzled with action, danger and romance" while noting that these were "definitely not your mother's fairies." I don't usually read trashy books but for something salacious set in Louisiana I was willing to make an exception. This was my first foray into the realm of Urban Fantasy and I entered blindly, knowing only that this book was a sequel. Fair enough.
The book opens just at the point where the previous title ends. There's sufficient back-tracking of all the antecedent action to catch the reader up to speed in the supernatural drama plaguing the small town of Donaldsonville, Louisiana.
In short: tiny, bloodsucking, venomous fairies terrorize the south-eastern US. The few people who are immune work for government organizations such as the Fairy Containment Corps.
Annabelle Lee is immune. She collects fairy eggs from pools of stagnant water. She likes to get drunk a lot and tease her two ex-boyfriends and this one other dude who's got an eye on her—except she doesn't totally have her eye on that last dude as he spends most of the book being invisible. And Annabelle's got some unexplained magical powers which are related to some mysterious medicine she has totake, because the fairies bit her in the last book. And if she doesn't take the medicine then she'll totally lose her shit. Oh yeah, and the fairy poop is used to make a highly addictive drug called Breeze. And the FBI's all up in there too.
At times this book reads more like what I imagine a paranormal romance would, but it's not really all that juicy. And I was expecting a bit more blood, given the title. I didn't think people would exactly be covered in blood, but the title was a little misleading. And it didn't really feel all that cajun either.
This is not high quality writing. Mostly I kept reading it because the parts that were meant to be "sexy" were ridiculously hilarious. Some times the hilarity is intentional though. What most irritated me about this book was swearing. Sometimes Annabelle would censor her thoughts by saying "eff" that and other times the word "fuck" would be said/thought without any compunction. The inconsistency bothered me.
Sample sentence: Does an invisible man count as a man?
I don't think I'll be reading any others in this series. I've heard other authors do good Urban Fantasy, so I'm not writing off the genre.
Author: Stacey Jay
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
417 pages