Various Thoughts

Natasha Rhodes‘ Kayla Steele series is a bit odd. It’s set in Los Angeles and deals with the conflict between Vampires, Werewolves, and Hunters. A conflict that’s not as black and white as it first appears.

Dante’s Girl starts the series off with the death of Kayla’s boyfriend Karrel at the hands of a vampire named Cyan X (whom he apparently has a history with) and a group of werewolves working for her. It should probably be noted early-on that the book’s description is a total and complete lie; the term ‘Dark Arts’ is mentioned a whole once in the book itself, a cabal is not responsible for Karrel’s death, and he’s quite dead and their relationship is very past-tense. So what is the book actually about? Well, for some unknown reason, Cyan and the werewolves that killed Karrel seem to think that he told Kayla something important before he died, and so send assassins after her. She gets saved by the Hunters, and a strangely helpful werewolf, and learns that Karrel did not in fact work at the Humane Society, but was instead a Hunter. After much running around and death, the book ends with the friendly werewolf captured by the vampire-controlled police, Kayla training to become a Hunter, Karrel ending up in hell as a suicide, and the head werewolf of the group that formerly followed Cyan somehow in possession of the greatly feared vampire known as Harlequin. How did Harlem catch Harlequin? It is a mystery.

The first book, while strange, was not confusing. The Last Angel is a totally different story, as Rhodes doesn’t seem to have a grasp on the term ‘continuity’. The book opens with the death of an angel, followed by Kayla having a dream about Karrel’s fateful meeting with Cyan back in Prague… and for some unknown reason her one and only friend shared the exact same dream. That’s completely dropped a few pages later though as Kayla is informed by Ninette, her Hunter team leader, that they need to go after the angel body before it triggers Armageddon. Then that is dropped as things switch to the the friendly werewolf from the first book, Mutt (a horrible name I might add), who’s being held in an underground illegal fighting ring type place… and where Cyan refers to him as Mathias on one line for no apparent reason. The action, so to speak, jumps back to Kayla who ends up in a briefing some interminable time later about what the angel-body could mean and what the Hunters have to do about it. The scene is notable only because it actually shows some of the fabled ‘Dark Arts’ that were only mentioned on the book-cover until this point. Shockingly, Ninette and Paul are allegedly the two Hunters with the most knowledge of this magic, and yet they showed no sign of it during the first book when they were repeatedly almost killed. That continuity hiccup is compounded by the one just before it; Ninette claimed that the Hunter base has never had a breach… yet there was a very large breach due to an angry werewolf hunting down Kayla in the first book that allowed her to escape the compound with Mutt. Then, things get worse. The next scene is of Cyan and Mutt in the bowls of wherever it is this fighting ring is. After a somewhat lengthy exchange Cyan gets the better of him and demands to know why everyone was after Karrel and the scene ends. The next time we see Mutt, he’s in a crate in a random storeroom seemingly waiting for Kayla’s arrival. Why? It is a mystery. To top off everything; the secret that Karrel’s apparently been keeping allegedly has to do with with the two last angels, how the Hunters are really an evil organization, and nothing at all to do with with traitor from the first book… despite the fact that the traitor in question (who’s mysteriously absent from this book) said that he killed him because he knew about the vampire’s plan to make a mutant army.

There are so many mysteries, dead-ends, about-faces, continuity breaches, mythology breaks, and questionable characterizations present in the second book that it may very well invalidate the existence of the first. The first was decent, if a bit strange, but the second throws the first into such total confusion that I’m just not sure where the series stands. I seriously thought for a time that I was missing a book, and that this was really the third book in the series… but that’s not the case. The one issue that really stands out in my mind the most though is the way the werewolves go from being human-intelligent in their wolfman forms, to mindless killers in their wolfman forms, and then back again to intelligent depending on the current demands of the plot.

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