Hello everyone!
Besides, I need something pretty epic for the start, right?
Like with the Talkie one!
And this one IS epic.
I mean to be fair, the first volume of this series was already pretty darn epic all on its own, and I reviewed it back in the summer of last year. I almost completely forgot about the fact that there was supposed to be a sequel until BookSirens kindly reminded me of that little bit of information.
Once I had it, though, I also had to nab the book ARC from the site as well.
Ain't nothing funnier than a necromancer and a vampire, let me tell you, although if we're being fair what's funnier might be the fact that there is a tear-inducing cliffhanger at the end!
Graveyard Waltz is up next.
I'll be linking previous review posts connected to this one down at the bottom of the page, as always.
Jessie Thomas probably wouldn't have been an author I ever stumbled across if not for BookSirens, the online ARC system where readers can request copies of books either pre-release or maybe just after release to have a look at, with the only caveat being that there is usually a time limit on how long you have to read them (this ranges from 30 to 90 days from what I've found).
But I mean, most of the books are pretty easy to finish within a day or two, so it isn't a hardship at all.
Now that we've filled in information from our sponsor, so to speak, let's look straight into Graveyard Waltz, okay?
Back in Kiss Me Deadly, we met Sera, the local necromancer who gets paid to bring people back from the dead. During the process of trying to figure out a massive mystery connected to some feral vampires and a weird cupcake cult (I'm not making this up!) she tries to help vampire Nate, in the end resurrecting his son Theo, who returns ... as a human!
Sera and Nate also enter into a relationship which estranges her from her sister Ellie, who was killed by a vampire back in the day and the first one Sera ever brought back.
But that was then, and this is now.
Sera and Ellie are still on the outs, and Sera is still bringing people back, but she finds out that someone has apparently beaten her to it, because one of her intended resurrections isn't where she's supposed to be, AND she gets arrested by a local detective who wants to pin some weird, gross murders on her.
Sprung by her ME friend Rhys, she and Nate and Dev then go check said murder out, only for it to turn out the most bizarre thing they've ever seen, like a zombie leaked fluids all over the place, AND Sera can't bring him back, the kicker of the hour.
It's as if there's a barrier in place, and her powers are useless to get through, but not only that, she gets physically affected (including but not limited to some weird phasing stuff and blood pouring from her nose).
As if that weren't problematic enough, they get an unexpected visit from an old friend of Nate's, who's job is to inform him that a ball is going to be held at his estate - said ball only happens every 150 years or so, it lasts about 3 days, and the vampires let loose during it, though most importantly, the Consortium who rules them has chosen the location and will be present.
So Sera gets a bit of insight into Nate's past, because said friend is also the one who turned him into a vampire and helped him, and she literally looks like the Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly of the vampires, and about as stylish. She helps Sera with a lot of her physical and relationship insecurities, as well, considering Sera would very much like Nate to feed from her vein, but he's like NOPE because there's always emotions transmitted through the feeding as well and it was always a problem before.
I mean, nothing beats the problem of having a ghoul attack you in your own home, though, which is what happens to Sera and she BARELY escapes, with Ellie's help, because Ellie breaks the spell holding the ghoul together.
See, turns out, Ellie found herself a coven, and they're working with death magic, as necromancy isn't the only thing that falls into that category, not that she wants to speak with Sera now, either.
But as things heat up, and it's revealed some dude named Lazarus is after Sera (actually after, because he can somehow teleport her from one location to the other) and wants her to become 'who she was born to be' or something, by stealing other people's power instead of reviving them, it becomes personal enough for Ellie to get involved despite the fact she still wants Nate to be out of the picture.
And of course, Sera DOES manage to persuade Nate to feed from her ... only to have his heart re-start and him to become partly human again because of her necromancer blood, which is something that's NEVER happened before.
Together they then visit a witch coven to try and figure out how to break the protective spell around Lazarus' victims, whose souls he keeps trapped to suck their power from, and Sera has no clue how to do it on her own. The time crunch becomes worse when it's Rhys who gets taken, and the lot of them trek out to some old graveyard to fight Lazarus.
It's not a hugely successful fight, regardless that Dev wants to decapitate him and Nate is also there, but the sisters DO manage to resurrect Rhys in an effort of teamwork, as Ellie breaks the barrier which allows Sera to then bring Rhys' soul back to this side.
It turns out that Lazarus himself was or is a necromancer, and he took out an entire coven of them in New York to build up some of his core power, giving us a glimpse at a much wider world which Sera has always shied away from, being the loner she is.
She can't lone-wolf it anymore though, because Lazarus isn't someone she can take on alone, especially not with the problematic ball thing hanging over their heads - or the fact that some weird hunters break into Nate's house trying to kill the vampires in it. Dev doesn't know them, so she's investigating this through the hunters that work for the city, since no one is willing to have another human/vampire war on their hands.
And do you think she's successful?
HAHA. Nope.
The hunters descend en masse during the ball and a slaughter begins, with Lazarus also paying court and playing with Sera's sanity, but even as she tries to protect Theo, Ellie arrives to try and apologize - see, the hunters are HER fault.
She put a hit out on Nate, because ... well, killing a vampire who has nothing to do with how you died and ripping your sister's heart out of her chest is a practical path to take, I suppose.
Sera doesn't even have the time to deal with that though, because in the ensuing chaos, she suffers a deadly wound which literally ... kills her.
Oh yeah, she dead-dead.
She's also a ghost that's now haunting Nate's manor, on top of everything, but she did promise Nate she'd be coming back, so now she has to figure out how to necromance her way from beyond the stupid veil, especially as Nate and Ellie are both MIA by the time her soul comes to consciousness again and she clocks into what happened.
So the odds are definitely stacked against our motley crew, especially now that they've lost their strongest asset, aka the person who can bring them all back in case one of them croaks. But I'm never going to be found betting against Sera, so I can't wait for book three to see just how she manages to turn the tables on everybody and everything, and come back to take some more names, Lazarus prime among them.
FIN.
You know ... be careful what you wish for. Or ask for.
At the ending of my review for the first book of this series, I practically begged the author not to rip Nate and Sera apart in a huff so they can then get back together. Which, hurray! She didn't.
She just went and jabbed a stake through my heart, then stomped it down for good measure in a twist I DID NOT SEE COMING.
To summarize very nicely, then: Sera is ghosting. Nate is still romancing. I'm trying to figure out how the heck this all works, but ya know. Mystery, mystery!
All the usual suspects are back, Devyn, Rhys, Teddy, but we get the addition of a smartass detective who - surprise, surprise! - needs the very necromancer he arrests far too often to save his ass.
I love it.
I also love the addition of Violet, and the Consortium who decide they want NATE to host a party for them because ... well, because.
And then there's the fact there's this dude, Lazarus - no, not the saint that Matthew in A Discovery of Witches prays to, sadly - he's a necromancer. Or was. And a ghoul. Or ... something. He seems to want to be a god? He also wants to have people worship Sera for her powers because ... I don't know at this point. He's a pain in the butt who causes massive problems throughout the book, and will probably be a big entity in the next one too, seeing as we didn't get rid of him yet.
Honestly though, this one gets 5 stars from me because IT HAS EVERYTHING. The cast is stellar, the writing is brilliant (notwithstanding that the ARC had some grammatical errors and occasional words missing), and the fact that you're so invested in these characters as you read along tells you something. I was on a time crunch to finish this book, but dash it all I was going to do it if it was the very last thing.
All the best bits of the first book are in this one, and amplified through into a second, and now all I want is the sequel to this, because the cliffhanger of all cliffhangers that I never anticipated follows that stake through the heart.
Oh, and, someone call that annoying detective, please. There's a mess for him to clean up.
At the ending of my review for the first book of this series, I practically begged the author not to rip Nate and Sera apart in a huff so they can then get back together. Which, hurray! She didn't.
She just went and jabbed a stake through my heart, then stomped it down for good measure in a twist I DID NOT SEE COMING.
To summarize very nicely, then: Sera is ghosting. Nate is still romancing. I'm trying to figure out how the heck this all works, but ya know. Mystery, mystery!
All the usual suspects are back, Devyn, Rhys, Teddy, but we get the addition of a smartass detective who - surprise, surprise! - needs the very necromancer he arrests far too often to save his ass.
I love it.
I also love the addition of Violet, and the Consortium who decide they want NATE to host a party for them because ... well, because.
And then there's the fact there's this dude, Lazarus - no, not the saint that Matthew in A Discovery of Witches prays to, sadly - he's a necromancer. Or was. And a ghoul. Or ... something. He seems to want to be a god? He also wants to have people worship Sera for her powers because ... I don't know at this point. He's a pain in the butt who causes massive problems throughout the book, and will probably be a big entity in the next one too, seeing as we didn't get rid of him yet.
Honestly though, this one gets 5 stars from me because IT HAS EVERYTHING. The cast is stellar, the writing is brilliant (notwithstanding that the ARC had some grammatical errors and occasional words missing), and the fact that you're so invested in these characters as you read along tells you something. I was on a time crunch to finish this book, but dash it all I was going to do it if it was the very last thing.
All the best bits of the first book are in this one, and amplified through into a second, and now all I want is the sequel to this, because the cliffhanger of all cliffhangers that I never anticipated follows that stake through the heart.
Oh, and, someone call that annoying detective, please. There's a mess for him to clean up.
xx
*image not mine
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