Ilona Andrews’ ninth Kate Daniels novel forces Kate to fully embrace her power and brings the conflict with her father to a head. Presumably the 10th book will be the series finale and this one does a pretty fantastic job of setting the stage while being entertaining in its own right.
There are many short stories in the Kate Daniels series that are scattered about. Several were collected into the Small Magics E-book, and of these the first two are probably the best while the second-to-last gives an interesting glimpse into a pre-shift time. Others have been released as stand-alone E-books, such as Magic Stars (which is decent), Magic Dreams (which is okayish, having originally been released in the anthology Hexed), and Magic Steals (which is similar to Dreams for obvious reasons but works better). All of them help flesh out the world and are worth taking a look at so long as you don’t mind bite-sized episodic stories.
Changing gears we come to The Turn, which is a prequel to the Hollows series that centers on Trent’s parents and how the virus that decimated humanity came into being. While it starts out good, once the plague is loosed and the focus shifts over toward action and demon summoning it does not hold up well at all; the scenes don’t really gel and most of the character behavior goes to shit. Rather than being its own thing it instead transforms into a pale imitation of the main series.
