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Book Review of Halfway to the Grave (Night Huntress, Bk 1)

Halfway to the Grave (Night Huntress, Bk 1)
nantuckerin avatar reviewed on + 158 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


I came to Jeaniene Frost's Night Huntress series a little late in the game -- the first book was released in 2007 -- but I am so glad I finally got my hands on a copy of Halfway to the Grave! Not since Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse or Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson has a character charmed me as much as Cat Crawfield.

Half-vampire, half-mortal, 22-year-old Cat has spent her post-pubescent years on a nightly hunt for vampires. Using her extra vampire-derived abilities and her very human female ones, she tracks and seduces vampires in bars, lures them away and stakes them in a never-ending quest for vengeance for her mother's attack by a vampire, which ended in her rare birth.

As a lead character, Cat is plucky, reckless and endearing all at once. But even she meets her match when she unsuccessfully tries to bag Bones, a British master vampire who also happens to be a rogue bounty hunter, tracking and killing his own kind for money. When her ambush of Bones goes bad, she reluctantly agrees to team up on their shared mission -- vampire slaying. Through rigorous training, makeovers and covert missions with ghouls, ghosts and chop-shop operators, Cat begins to change her broad negative opinion of vampires, and develop traitorously affectionate feelings for platinum-haired Bones.

The main plotline -- involving a human trafficking ring and a healthy dose of human and vampire politics -- is sound, but the inter-character relationships are the shining star of this novel. I loved the interactions between Cat and Bones most of all. The dialogue is so funny, I honestly laughed at loud at times. And let's be honest: if there's been a sexier male lead in the genre, I can't name him. Bones absolutely sizzles in every page he's on, and is the perfect dichotomy of bad boy/hero. However, some of the relationships were less satisfying. I really disliked Cat's exchanges with her mother, and found that character to be absolutely loathsome. No wonder the poor girl has issues.

I could keep raving, but the other positive reviews for this series can tell you the rest. Frost is a wonderful author -- one book in, and I'm already a fan. I can't wait to begin One Foot in the Grave to see what lies ahead for my favorite new vampire slayer. (Sorry, Buffy.)