Karissa E. (ophelia99) reviewed on 5/4/2011 + 2527 more book reviews

This is the fourth book in the Elemental Assassin series. Right now there are five books contracted for this series (although the author stated on her blog she would like the write a sixth). The fifth book, Spider's Revenge, is due to be released September 2011. This book was an excellent addition to this series. We learn a lot of back-story about Bria and Gin; and Gin starts to come to terms with the relationship she is developing both with Owen and with Bria.

This book starts out shortly after the last book ended. Gin has been harassing Mab Monroe for the last few weeks and taking down Mab's men, but Gin is getting restless with that and is gearing up to take Mab on personally. Then Gin finds out that Mab has hired the notorious assassin LaFleur; not only to take out the Spider, but also to take out Gin's sister Bria. Now one more obstacle stands between Gin and Mab, and Gin will stop at nothing to protect the people she loves.

All in all this was an excellent book. It was paced well and had a lot of great action scenes. We get to see Gin do some awesome magic and we also get to see Gin's softer side. As the assassin Spider, Gin has had to do horrible things, but she has finally found a man that can accept that. We get to watch as Gin and Owen's relationship turns into something more than just an attraction. Gin has yet to reveal her identity as the Spider to her sister Bria, and she can only hope that Bria will accept her as readily as Owen has. It was great to see Gin finally dealing with her feelings about these things and watch her grow into a better and more content person.

LaFleur was an okay bad guy, but left something to be desired. LaFleur only liked to kill in one way and only had one goal in mind, and this made her a pretty uncreative and two-dimensional villain. Gin could have used a better baddie to face off with, but the fight scenes between them were pretty good.

Gin is still snarky and there is some sarcastic humor laced throughout the book; although it was toned down in this book. There were still a couple scenes that had me laughing a bit. Estep's writing style is fun and easy to read and I enjoyed it a lot.

I did have a couple small problems with this book. The first was that Gin doesn't really use her elemental powers in new and exciting ways. Sure she finds a new way to use her Ice magic, but outside of that we see a lot of the tricks we saw in previous books; nothing really new and exciting. The other thing that bothered me was all of the back story. I love some back story to remind me of what happened in the previous books, but the back story in this book was extremely repetitive. Gin repeats things about her and Bria over and over and makes the same comments about her past over and over. There were times where I stopped to check and make sure I wasn't rereading the same page over again because the phrases were identical, and I wasn't...it was just very repetitive. The good thing about it is I don't think you would have to read previous books to enjoy this one, the bad thing was the repetitiveness of the back story drove me crazy.

Overall this was a solid addition to the series, but not as good as the previous couple books. While it is wonderful to see Gin settling down into her life and becoming more comfortable with the people in her life and the emotions they evoke; I was a bit disappointed we didn't see a more creative use of magic in this book and I also found the main bad girl (LaFleur) to be boring and two-dimensional. I was also bothered by sheer amount and repetitiveness of back story included (phrases were repeated over and over). Still I enjoyed the book and had fun reading it. I am hoping we get to Gin's final face-off with Mab in Spider's Revenge and can't wait to read that book.

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