Fire & Water

The third instalment of the Kate Kane series. A recap, Kate is a London-based paranormal investigator, she's dating a sex-obsessed vampire Prince called Julian (who is a woman), she also has the lingerie model werewolf Alpha itching to get in her pants. She is the daughter of the Queen of the Wild Hunt and is currently employing a walking, talking statue called Elena as an office assistant as a favour to a rat-gestalt. One of her ex-girlfriends is a tech-gazillionaire with Bruce Wayne delusions, another is a high-end art thief, a third is the Witch Queen of London, oh and her one-and-only ex-boyfriend is a former undercover vampire agent with an Edward Cullen creepy vibe over teenage girlfriends (both of whom so far have turned out to have special powers). Kate is hired by the Merchant of Dreams, who owns a magic pawn shop (amongst other things) to retrieve a stolen artefact which concealed the Tears of Hypnos. Along the way she meets a God, Elena's creator and several of her sisters, gets reacquainted with an old enemy and gets beaten up numerous times (no change there then!). I am definitely enjoying this series but I am getting a vague whiff of rinse-and-repeat. Kate's self-penned epitaphs as she makes silly mistakes, the way in which each of the characters has a stock phrase that they trot out etc, etc. Also we seem to be in a push-me, pull-me holding pattern with the romance with Julian which is almost canon for this sort of series. On to the next one, once I have cleared some of my TBR backlog.