Final Heir by Faith Hunter – Review & Excerpt
Amazon / B&N / Kobo / Google Play / Apple / BAM / Book Depository
Description:
Jane Yellowrock is the queen of the vampires, and that makes her a target as she fights to maintain control and keep peace in the city of New Orleans. She has enemies at every turn, because vampires live forever, and they keep their grudges alive with them. That includes the Heir, the vampire sire of the Pellissier bloodline, which gave rise to Leo Pellissier himself—Jane’s old boss and the former master of the city.
With the Heir and all the forces of darkness he can muster arrayed against her, Jane will need all the help she can get. She’ll find it in her city, her friends, her found family, and, of course, the Beast inside of her.
Review:
Final Heir by Faith Hunter is the 15th and final book in her fantastic Jane Yellowrock series. I have said previously, this series just keeps on getting better and better, and Final Heir was the best one yet. Sad to say, this is the final book for Jane Yellowrock, and I will miss her and the gang terribly. Hopefully, Faith will give us some snippets of Jane in any upcoming books.
Jane is the Dark Queen of the vampires, and she always has to fight the evil villains, as she has many enemies that target her. In Final Heir, she must face another of the Sons of Darkness, who is the Heir (from Pellissier bloodline), determined to kill her, and take over all of New Orleans. When a surprise attack in New Orleans happens, Jane and her team (Bruiser, Eli, Alex, Brute, Koun, Quint, Wrasser,Molly and Angie, etc), must join the battle when the Heir brings his evil witches to destroy the Null house, which holds the heart of the last Heir, and they will stop at nothing to get it. I love how Jane’s team, besides Bruiser, Eli, Alex and Wrassler has grown into a fascinating security team that we met in the previous book (Koun, Quint, Thelma, Kojo, Brute, etc). In Final Heir, with evil in full force, she has a great team to join her in fighting the enemies.
From start to finish, the story is action-packed, constant danger, deaths, violence, blood and surprises along the way, as I held my breath many times in fear of losing our favorites. What follows is an exciting, intense, action-packed thriller, with Jane and team in constant danger, as they are facing probably the most powerful evil enemy. Jane always flies by the seat of her pants, but now she has her team and those who have sworn loyalty to her. I will miss so many of the wonderful characters that have over time added to the 15 books of this series. I loved Jane, Beast and the core, Eli, Alex, Molly, Angie (love her), Leo, Gee, Edmond, just to name a few.
Final Heir was a fantastic finale to the Jane Yellowrock series, which I will sadly miss. Thank you, Faith Hunter for a wonderful 13 years and 15 books, with a fantastic heroine in Jane Yellowrock. Please please give us more; in whatever you have planned, especially with Angie. For those of you who have not read this series (which you need to start at the beginning), you are missing a great series, a super wonderful bad-ass heroine in Jane Yellowrock.
Reviewed by Barb
Copy provided by Publisher
Chapter 1
Like a Stray Animal
Haunting Aggie’s Home
Eyes closed, I felt the movement of unexpected cool air as the sweathouse door opened and shut. Last week, I had learned that Aggie One Feather, the Cherokee elder leading me into understanding my personal and tribal history, sometimes left and reentered when I was sweating through a haze of her herbal infusions and my own hidden memories. She said humans couldn’t survive five or six hours in a sweathouse like I could, let alone all night, so she would slip out and back in.
I had asked her if she had a nanny camera hidden in the sweathouse to keep track of me. Her reply had made me laugh: “You need a legion of angels to look over you, but a nanny cam could help.”
The rustling of her cotton shift, the sound of her breath, and the crackle of flames seemed loud as she settled across the fire from me and fed the coals. I smelled cedar and burning herbs and heard the scritch-grind of her mortar and pestle. Behind my lids it seemed lighter than before. It had to be near dawn.
It occurred to me that the ceremonial fire was, itself, symbolic. It was parts of this world and the next, the two halves of the universe, energy and matter. It was wood and air and energy, and together they made flame and smoke, the destruction of matter into energy. Then that thought wisped away with the fire.
Aggie said, “Drink.”
I opened my eyes against the crack and burn of dried sweat, and studied the small pottery cup she held. On the third try I managed to croak, “Eye of newt? Ragweed? Mold off your bathroom floor? Peyote?”
“That never gets old,” she lied, amusement hidden in her gaze. “I have no mold on my bathroom floor.”
Which meant the liquid could be composed of the other three. Or not. I took the cup and drained it. The decoction tasted of lemon peel, fennel, wild ginger, something I couldn’t identify, and salt. I turned the empty, handleless cup in my fingers. It wasn’t traditional Cherokee work, but something fired in a modern kiln and given a bright blue glaze.
“What did your dreams show you?” Aggie asked.
I handed back the cup and said, “Same as last time. The angel’s location looks a little like my soul home. Walls that curve in toward the ceiling, dark streaks of water on them. Wings that seem to lie flat across the ceiling and down, as if dripping to the floor. Light that comes from nowhere and everywhere. There might have been a puddle of blood on the floor. Hard to tell. But unlike my soul home, I keep seeing people standing along the walls.”
“People or other angels?”
I frowned at the question. Had there been wings behind the people? “Maybe. Maybe a suggestion of wings, like shadows. Or maybe I just want to have seen that and so I remember it now.”
“Did you see yourself in your dream-state?”
If I watched myself, as opposed to being an active part of the dream, that would tell her a lot about whether this was a vision teaching me about myself and my life path, a prophetic dream portending something about the future, or if it had been a memory. I closed my eyes again and pulled at the fragments. The angel’s wings draped, so much larger, longer than in artwork depicting the messenger beings. I heard the faint drip of water, but the echo was different from the usual loud reverberations of my soul home. This place itself was subtly different from previous visions.
In the memory of my vision, I saw myself. My hair was braided into a fighting queue and I was dressed in armor, one of the latest models Eli, my brother of choice, bought these days, now that money wasn’t an object. In teaching visions, I usually wore tribal clothing, the kind my father had worn when I was a child.
In addition to the armor, at my waist I was wearing the Mughal blade that Bruiser had given me.
That was interesting.
In the dream-state I did nothing, said nothing, so it probably wasn’t a vision teaching me about who I was or guiding my path through life. Seeing myself meant it wasn’t a memory. The ancient knife itself was part of a prophecy, and I seldom wore it, mostly for ceremonial occasions when the prophecy did me no good. Only rarely had I worn it into battle.
When he gave the blade to me, Bruiser had said, “A certain wily salesman suggested that the damascene blade is charged with a spell of life force, to give the wielder the ability to block any opponent’s death cut. Pure balderdash, but it makes a nice tale.” Except that Alex, the tech-genius of Yellowrock Securities and Clan Yellowrock, had traced the blade back to the seventeen hundreds, and there were stories over the centuries about people surviving the death stroke of an opponent’s blade.
“Prophecy?” I asked the universe. Or God, if he was listening. Not that anyone answered, not even Aggie. And since I hadn’t looked for the future in rain droplets in months, I might not know what this meant until it was too late. However, if I went searching for the meaning in the future, I probably wouldn’t understand it anyway, and if I saw danger-and I would-I might feel forced to meddle in time. Meddling in time-timewalking, time-jumping- might trigger the return of the magic cancer. All of which was why I hadn’t tried. Seeing the future was like that. Helpful. Until it wasn’t. And then it tried to kill me.
I inhaled and caught a familiar scent. He had to be close because I was human-shaped, and my nose in this form was unspectacular. I cleared my throat again and warned, “Werewolf.”
Ace Mass Market Original
