About Angela Wilson
Location: Midwest
Occupation: Web Producer/Freelance Writer
Bio: I love to read - and write - and surf. My FAV genres include mysteries, romantic suspense and thrillers. I'm finally working on my own thriller (under a pen name) and writing a book on marketing/PR for authors. I blog about writing at www.wickedwordsmith.com, and have accounts on various sites. You can find me on MySpace, Facebook and more by visiting www.angelawilson.net.
Posts: 338
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The third installment in the Anna Strong series packs too many plots within the 291 pages, but still offers a good read to faithful series readers.
I always hesitate to start a series because eventually, I get disappointed. I got disgusted with the genre change of the Anita Blake series about six books in and I’ve never been able to go back. Old faithful J.D. Robb had a few letdowns a few years back, but quickly peaked my interest again.
The first two books of the Anna Strong series rocked. Anna is a tough-as-nails bounty hunter who was turned into a vampire during a bad take down. No human knows about her new predilection for blood, and she is desperately trying to hang on to the last thread of her humanity while learning more about the paranormals in her native San Francisco.
The third book, The Watcher, looked just as awesome, and I couldn’t wait to read it. While it was good, it was a little disappointing. There were so many stories, at times it felt like several short
stories rather than a cohesive novel. Author Jeanne C. Stein pulled it together at the end, but it was still overload. Let me share:
The paranormals send Anna out to take care of a rogue vampire serial killer, she has to save her blood provider Culebra from certain death, she stands up against a deadly drug dealer intent on killing her boyfriend Max, she takes on a Wiccan sorceress, has to deal with the razor-edge balance of lying to her human friends and family while she trains with her new paranormal family and she helps out a family in a domestic dispute that goes worse than deadly when her partner David gets shot. Oh, and she also has to deal with David’s bitch girlfriend and relationship tension with Max and her vampire mentor. Whew. That’s a lot.
It was titled The Watcher because Anna was chosen as a special guardian to keep rogue paranormals in check, and yet we didn’t really get a feel for the group of specially-trained watchers except during Anna’s encounter with the rogue vampire. I thought the novel would involve her cases as a watcher, rather than a series of scattered events from San Francisco to Mexico.
The novel is not a waste of time or money, and it certainly won’t keep me from buying the next in the series, but it was just too much in one sitting.
