URBAN FANTASY REVIEW: Kitty Norville 8: Kitty Goes to War - Carrie Vaughan

Release Date: 13/01/11

SYNOPSIS:

Three soldiers recently returned from the war in Afghanistan are in custody at Ft Carson in Colorado Springs. They're werewolves, suffering from post traumatic stress, which has left them unable to control their shapeshifting, unable to interact with people. Kitty agrees to see them; after her own battles in KITTY'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (Kitty #7), she feels a great deal of sympathy for them. The soldiers were part of a unit fighting Taliban insurgents in the remote mountains of Afghanistan. Their captain, the original werewolf, transformed the others; their new-found strengths including the ability to survive untold violence while infiltrating remote enemy positions, made them the perfect soldiers for this mission. But it was the captain who kept the group together and kept them sane; when a particularly potent mortar attack killed the captain, the remaining lycanthrope soldiers grew more and more wild, until the final three survivors were captured and delivered to Dr Shumacher at the Center for the Study of Paranatural Biology for treatment. Kitty tries to bring the men into her own pack, to socialise them back into some kind of normal existence, but the group's sergeant has other plans: he's intent on driving out Kitty and Ben and becoming the leader of a new squad of killers.


REVIEW:

As a huge fan of Carrie’s Kitty Norville I really couldn’t wait to get my hands on this book. As usual its well written, the characters as engrossing as even and with Cormac getting a brand new lease of life as well as a whole hatful of new tricks it was going to be a seat of the pants journey. The prose were strong, the characters continued to grow as Kitty and Ben’s connection has and when backed with great action sequences it made this the usual quality that I’ve come to expect from Carrie.

That said, whilst I did enjoy this title it did feel more like it was a couple of short stories blended to create a novel length title which while it was OK, I did feel each could have been expanded more to create two full length titles rather than rushing to conclude both parts which were unrelated except in order to help generate the lead character with a way and means to get to a certain point in the tale. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy it but the fact that these two arcs felt fairly short did leave me wondering if the research time either wasn’t available or the deadline approached a lot faster than the author anticipated.