I was holding out on reading this, the final book in Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniel series, for a long time. Over the years, these books were warm stew, a thick blanket, and a campfire. They were familiar, comfortable, and satisfying, every time. After the first 9 books, as a reader, I wondered how on earth it was going to finish. It seemed impossible, because we knew that as powerful as Kate was, Roland, her father and enemy, was even moreso, and even if she could somehow beat those odds, their lives were still tied to each others’.
No spoilers, but man. It’s just clever, what they do. Because these books have always been about fighting and magic and supernatural beings, but they’ve also been about family, history, mythology, and putting in the intellectual legwork to attain knowledge and answers that give the physical fight direction and purpose and a chance at success. Even when our heroes’ success seems miraculous, you still feel like they earned it.
My only regret while reading this is that I waited long enough that some of the details that were built on previous stories didn’t completely come back to me, so I had to rely more on context clues than my actual memory. But that is basically justification to re-read these sooner rather than later. And maybe with me being so far behind in all of the reviews I have to write, I can do with a lot of re-reads so that my backlog doesn’t continue to get worse.