Hello everyone!
I was actually on a time crunch with this one because for some reason it slipped through the cracks for me and I ended up needing to hustle to finish it so that I could deliver by the deadline.
I've sort of made myself a promise to read faster now LOL.
Anyway, I was intrigued by the story synopsis and initially thought it was just going to be one of those easy, summery romance reads with maybe a sprinkling of some other international spy agency stuff thrown in the mix.
Of course I couldn't have been more wrong and THAT is something, honestly!
I very rarely get surprised by books these days but this one sure did, and Sarah Westill knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote it if you ask me.
Because not only does it actually have a concrete plot, it's also got intrigue and mystery for days, and there's more to it than meets the eye!
So here we go, enter Wintersfall.
I'm fairly sure I have nothing remotely like this in all my blogging journey thus far because it's such a unique take on things, so sadly there are no other links at the bottom of this blog post.
However, there are more books in this series than just this one, and you can bet I'm going to be reading them. Like Pokemon, gotta catch em all!
Starting our review, we meet Katria, a girl who's lost her entire family, or most of it: her mother and sister were killed in a shooting incident, while her father's withdrawn from the world afterwards so it's basically like she were on her own.
She gets recruited by the government to go train and become part of a special operations group that could really use her skillset - see, in the world of Wintersfall, there was a massive cataclysmic event that basically wiped out most of the world's population, turned the weather practically icy all across the globe, and allowed four or five different nations to rise out of the ashes afterwards.
Humans being humans, they've also experimented genetically, mixed, been isolated, etc, and eventually this resulted in individuals inheriting more than just their parents' looks in their genetics, but also their skillsets. These people are called Genetic Heirs, or Gen-Heirs, and they're incredibly valuable because their genes literally connect to the world around them and allow them to respond much faster than a regular individual ever would.
Katria is a Gen-Heir, of her father, an infamous assassin and one of the world's top tier ones, which allows her to connect with any gun they hand her because her genetics literally tell her what she has to do and how the thing works.
She's recruited and given to Sean's team, Sean also being a Gen-Heir and a sympath/empath, which is he responds to emotions he feels coming from people, and he absorbs emotions of others when he touches them.
Three years into their missions together comes the first botched one when they receive bad intel, are recalled back home and looked at under a microscope - and it's also revealed that Sean and Katria unknowingly signed a marriage contract when they first started working together, so now they're expected to be husband and wife in their capital city.
On top of that, Sean is actually pretty high ranking, having inherited his family's title, so that's added pressure for rural girl Katria - along with everything else, say, someone specifically needing the group in the country because people are going missing and there seems to be a spice from Alexandria (functioning as a drug) that's being illegally distributed.
Between all that intrigue, a former lover of Sean's who just can't take no for an answer, and random assassination attempts on Katria along the way (one of which is almost successful when they stab her in the street), it soon becomes clear the group will have to operate on home soil for once, and recruit some others to help them, a journalist sister of one member and an investigator who both join forces with them.
If you think wow, this is already so much! There's also this thing called Human Rabies Syndrome, which is basically what it sounds like, rabies, turning humans into flesh eating zombie monsters when infected (and one of those zombie things actually attacks Katria at the start of the story).
In between trying to solve all of this, Sean and Katria also grow closer and share their own secrets, namely that Sean's family were all addicts to something or other (his father to gambling, his mother to sex, his brother to predatory behaviour) and that Sean is terrified of going down that same road, though Katria helps assure him that's never going to happen.
As for Katria, she was given a new identity when she started working with the team, and only now reveals to Sean whose daughter she is, as she's trying to solve the murder of her mother and sister, which turns out was actually an ordered hit: someone tried to take her entire family out, so that young Katria would then be more impressionable and easy to recruit.
How does she know this?
Well because she ends up getting abducted by this mysterious "someone" who tells her they're recruiting young people, under twenty-one, all Gen-Heirs if possible, and given that the group has already discovered their country's government is corrupt, they have their work cut out for them.
With Sean and Katria reunited and strong in their personal union together, however, it's probably safe to bet that there's trouble coming to roost for the people who are attempting to pull their strings. Especially as they've also involved the wife of another team member unwittingly, which puts pressure on everybody.
With that however, Wintersfall ends, and the only way to figure out the rest is to pick up book two, Raiventon!
Dun dun dunnn.
I'll be honest - when I picked this book up, I was ABSOLUTELY and TOTALLY expecting it to be a fluffy piece that had some secret agent stuff, but would mostly center around the love story between the two leads on the front cover.
Oh I have never been so wrong, nor as glad to be wrong!
Sure, Katria and Sean have a delightful relationship in this book, more so because there's no back and forth, oh no he said something I don't like so I'm going to leave him dramatically and make him apologise for the mistakes I make kind of vibe.
There's a lot of twists and turns in the story which I thoroughly enjoyed, and a host of supporting characters that you get to know through the pages of the book whom I also fell in love with, especially Cora and Jonathan. I'm actually really intrigued as to the mystery behind everything, because you don't get to the actual resolution at the end of this book, making it almost a necessity to pick up the second one.
But I will say the suspense is pretty great, all things considered, and I especially love how both Sean and Katria keep thinking they'll ruin the other's reputation … and then it turns out that's really not something to worry over since, you know, ruined already and all that jazz. I also enjoyed their private dynamic, as well as the dynamic between the whole team, which I'd have loved to see more of, actually, them functioning together as one cohesive body.
The setting is fairly unique, as far as I'm concerned and as much as I've read thus far, with an established world that doesn't feel too much of a copy of anyone else's but largely an original, with a combination of sci-fi and Victorian, which I suppose would make it steampunk in a way? Maybe. I really liked it, whatever it is. I may have to read it again to get a bit of a better feel for the political body and machinations, but overall a very good piece of story with compelling characters, a world strong enough to stand on two legs, and mystery to keep you coming back for more.
The only reason I'm docking a star off what would have otherwise been a 5-star review is that there was quite a number of grammatical errors, doubled words, and sometimes there was some confusion about tense in the sentences, so I think a slightly tighter edit might have suited this work better. However at this point it can also only be nitpicking, as the story, characters, world and mystery don't really suffer for it, I just happen to notice this, coming off the linguistical study background that I have.
But 10/10 would recommend this, for sure!
Oh I have never been so wrong, nor as glad to be wrong!
Sure, Katria and Sean have a delightful relationship in this book, more so because there's no back and forth, oh no he said something I don't like so I'm going to leave him dramatically and make him apologise for the mistakes I make kind of vibe.
There's a lot of twists and turns in the story which I thoroughly enjoyed, and a host of supporting characters that you get to know through the pages of the book whom I also fell in love with, especially Cora and Jonathan. I'm actually really intrigued as to the mystery behind everything, because you don't get to the actual resolution at the end of this book, making it almost a necessity to pick up the second one.
But I will say the suspense is pretty great, all things considered, and I especially love how both Sean and Katria keep thinking they'll ruin the other's reputation … and then it turns out that's really not something to worry over since, you know, ruined already and all that jazz. I also enjoyed their private dynamic, as well as the dynamic between the whole team, which I'd have loved to see more of, actually, them functioning together as one cohesive body.
The setting is fairly unique, as far as I'm concerned and as much as I've read thus far, with an established world that doesn't feel too much of a copy of anyone else's but largely an original, with a combination of sci-fi and Victorian, which I suppose would make it steampunk in a way? Maybe. I really liked it, whatever it is. I may have to read it again to get a bit of a better feel for the political body and machinations, but overall a very good piece of story with compelling characters, a world strong enough to stand on two legs, and mystery to keep you coming back for more.
The only reason I'm docking a star off what would have otherwise been a 5-star review is that there was quite a number of grammatical errors, doubled words, and sometimes there was some confusion about tense in the sentences, so I think a slightly tighter edit might have suited this work better. However at this point it can also only be nitpicking, as the story, characters, world and mystery don't really suffer for it, I just happen to notice this, coming off the linguistical study background that I have.
But 10/10 would recommend this, for sure!
xx
*image not mine
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