I’m not done yet, but I’m having a really hard time with the cover. Why does Jane look like she’s gotten a Lip Kit or had lip injections?? ( )

An action-packed read that will have your heart racing as you frantically turn pages, wondering where Jane's story will lead her next. The plot moves along smoothly, and while you should read the earlier books in the series to understand everything going on, there aren't many dull moments within these pages. I won't give any spoilers, and while I don't know if this is where I thought the series would land, it's definitely an interesting new installment. ( )

True Dead
3.5 Stars

Jane and her court, yes she is the Dark Queen, return to NOLA to deal with those who pose a threat to her city and her people.

While this is a significant improvement over the last book, there are still several problematic issues. These include Janes's repetitive "woe is me, I'm the vampire queen" musings, her missing-in-action kick-ass nature, and her excessive preoccupation with religion.

It is made very clear that Jane does not want to be the Dark Queen and yet, she has accepted the role and all its trappings - get over it already! Also, what happened to Jane's fighting skills? All of a sudden she is taking a back seat to the action and allowing others to fight her battles for her - not a fan!

Finally, some of the books in the series have contained overt Christian themes, but it is completely overdone here. There are entire paragraphs of Jane going to church, worrying about souls, redemption, heaven, etc. These are incongruous and come across as proselytizing, which I personally dislike.

Despite these issues, the actual storyline is compelling with revelations, surprises and even traumas from beginning to end. The interactions between Jane and Beast as well as the other characters, Bruiser, Eli as well as the newbies, Thema and Quint, are wonderful.

In sum, this is a solid penultimate book and I am looking forward to the final installment. Hopefully it will meet expectations. ( )

TRUE DEAD was not my favorite installment of the Jane Yellowrock series. The first half was wordy and a tad bit boring. Jane made a lot of bad decisions and I hated reading about them. The second half of the book definitely picked things up in the action department. The storyline flowed better and I was more interested in what was happening.

Although I was a bit disappointed while reading TRUE DEAD I am still very interested in seeing how things will end for Jane and her clan. It has been a great series and I look forward to everyone hopefully getting their HEA in whatever way that might come. ( )

So here I am at the fourteenth Jane Yellowrock book and I'm still having a good time. That's quite an achievement by Faith Hunter.

Two years ago, the last novel, Shattered Bonds, went a long way to rebooting the series after the long story arc with Leo and the European vamps came to an end in Dark Queen, so I was keen to see where Jane would go next.

I was a little disappointed that the answer was New Orleans. I'd harboured a hope that Jane might go off and do something new, although I had no idea what. Still, you either trust an author or you don't, so I put my disappointment aside and waited to see where Faith Hunter took me and what she did to Jane in the process. She delivered an emotionally intense, action-packed novel that, despite being fifteen and a half hours long, I wolfed down in two days.

Yes, we did go back to New Orleans, where everything began but True Dead was a great example of the truth that you can never go back. You and the places you're in keep changing. One of the things I liked about the book was how Jane see the ghosts of her own past actions everywhere she goes. She's not haunted by them but she's not blind to them. As the book progresses, Jane's attention is mostly taken up by the realisation that being the Dark Queen means that when she puts herself at risk, she puts all her people at risk. If she dies, whoever kills her will not treat them well. It's quite an adjustment for her to make and I admired how Faith Hunter lets the realisation dawn upon her a little at a time.

Beast is one of my favourite characters in this series and I'm really enjoying the new I/we combination of Jane and Beast which allows them to work together and talk to each other while still keeping their separate identities. Beast has a simpler view of the world than Jane. Not a less intelligent one, but one that is driven by a certainty about who she is and what she wants that Jane has yet to acquire or acknowledge. One of the joys of the audiobook version of the novels is the voice that Khristine Hvam gives to Beast. It perfectly catches the cadences of Beast's thoughts. Listening to her switch from Beast to Jane and back again in a single paragraph and never leaving me in any doubt about who is speaking is an object lesson in excellent narration.

Like its predecessors, True Dead is packed with fight scenes and I think that they're some of the best in the series. They seem more spontaneous and less set-piece in nature than the previous books. There are new fighters and new weapons and new vulnerabilities and they are all written with a here-and-now intensity that I find impossible to resist.

With every book, the understanding of the magic that drives the creatures in Jane's world deepens. Each time I'm impressed by how Faith Hunter makes magical concepts concrete, credible and easy to believe in without simplifying or loading me down with arcane explanations. In Jane's battles, I can see the magic striking as clearly as I can see the blades slicing through muscle and bone.

Faith Hunter is an expert at getting me to care about the characters rather than just seeing them as avatars in a video game. She takes the time to show how Jane lives when she isn't engaged in a battle and she shows me that it's these moments of peace and the people she shares them with that give her a reason to fight and which win her the loyalty of her people. In this novel, we get the rare opportunity of a wedding and we get a couple of funerals and Faith Hunter delivers the full impact of both the join of the union and the grief over the deaths.

The only points when I found myself a little restless while I read was when we dived deep into Vamp plots and motivations and revisited all the things I thought I'd learned from earlier books and altered their meaning to create a new, threatening pattern. I know some people like these parts of the books and I can see that they're necessary to sustain the long story arcs but they don't do very much for me. Once or twice, the events and relationships that were being revisited and the patterns that were being drawn were so complicated, I felt that I needed a flow chart to keep up with them. It was like watching Faith Hunter do origami with the pages of the previous thirteen novels to produce a flying dragon. The skill it takes is amazing. The outcome is elegant. But the bit in the middle isn't exciting.

Nevertheless, this was another good novel in the series. It had some clever twists in it. It introduced some new characters, my favourite being the deadly sociopath that becomes Jane's Lady-in-Waiting and bodyguard. It also sets up a new story arc that I'm already looking forward to following as the next few books come out.
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