Book Review – Embrace the Night

Author: Karen Chance
Publisher: Penguin
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: April 2008

Embrace the Night, Karen Chance’s third volume in the Cassandra Palmer series is a fitting sequel to the first two. Fast paced and filled with faeries, kids, vampires, mages, ghosts, incubi, gargoyles, magic spells, evil plots, backstabbing and surprises – this one follows the lead of the first two and adds in a bit more of each to ‘kick it up a notch’ so to speak. In this novel, Cassie is now Pythia, the most powerful living clairvoyant with the charge of keeping the current timeline from being corrupted through unscrupulous use of time travel. Cassie’s familiarity with vampires and ghosts is an aid to her for this post but she has just a few tiny little obstacles to surmount. The first issue she has to deal with is a geis placed upon her by the very old and very powerful vampire Mircea. Just for complications sake, during one of her trips to the past, she accidentally caused the geis to be intensified. Another problem she must manage is her deal with the king of the faeries. She has agreed to retrieve an ancient book of magic for him. Not just any book but one written personally by Merlin and sought after by everyone who is anyone in the magical community. It hasn’t even been seen in hundreds of years, yet she has to find it and recover it. Working against her are the mage’s Silver Circle and various factions of this or that group that either want to kill her or control her because of her power.

Cassie, however, has friends. She has the permanently cranky Pritkin, war mage extraordinaire who is not only an expert on demons, but the son of one himself. Can she trust him? She also has Casanova, an incubus in the employ of her former tormentor, crime boss and vampire Tony. Can she trust him to not betray her to Tony? Then there are the gargoyles who illegally work the kitchen of the casino where she’s hiding out, Francoise a powerful witch transported from the past, and of course, Billy, her gambler ghost friend.

The action begins immediately and carries through to the final page. This one goes quickly and drags you along for the ride. Full of quirky humor, a bit of steamy romance, and lots of inventive magic and mayhem it is an enjoyable ride to follow along as Cassie attempts to control her gift, save her life and those of her friends as well as to get the magic, faerie and vampire communities off her back. Being new to the post of Pythia, she has to learn as she goes. Her jumps through time seem to be both too easy in a technical manner, as she decides she must go to a certain place and time and does so – even though in the last book it was explained that her magic was tied to a disarray of the timeline and that would be the only way she would travel back in time and would also dictate when she arrived; and too inconsistent – as her multiple leaps bring her physical discomfort some times but not others.

All in all a very engaging book that had me leaping through the pages, and since it is nearly double the size of the previous two, it kept me engaged for a decent amount of time. Now that Cassie is getting settled into the Pythia role, I expect that the series can branch out from personal-to-her stories to more stories of her working at the role of Pythia and keeping the timeline intact. I will definitely be interested in finding out what happens next.

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