Twice Bitten

May 24, 2010
Neill's briskly paced third Chicagoland Vampires paranormal romance (after 2009's Friday Night Bites) makes new readers comfortable with a thorough recap before diving into swiftly developing events that will satisfy returning fans. In the two months since graduate student Merit was involuntarily turned into the Cadogan House Sentinel by master vampire Ethan Sullivan, she's become part of the vampires' recent emergence into the public eye, battled another master vampire, suffered several emotional upheavals, and honed her fighting skills. Now she's assigned to guard the leader of North America's shape-shifters as the packs gather in Chicago to discuss the future of their often strained relationship with vampires. Merit's frequently snarky voice and amusing observations about the occasional absurdities of her situation combine with the magic of Neill's world in a refreshing take on urban fantasy.

June 1, 2010
The third novel in the Chicagoland Vampires series finds Merit, a relatively new vampire and the Sentinel of Cadogan House, detailed to assist a convention of shape-shifters planning to meet in the Windy City. Someone shoots up the tavern where Merit and Gabriel, a shape-shifting Alpha, are having preliminary talks, and the fight is on. Merit has to figure out which of several suspects is gunning for Gabriel, whether tensions between the various supernaturals are being deliberately fanned, if she wants to join a vampire internal policing organization, and how she ought to respond to the attraction she feels for Ethan, the 400-year-old head of Cadogan House. Its enough to keep a girl quite busy, and the pages turn fast enough to satisfy vampire and romance fans alike.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)