At long last, I'm getting to read things that aren't for the Notable Books Council, and this was the first one of the books I went back to on my stack. In it, we get back to the main thread of Omens, which I felt was somewhat dropped in Visions, Olivia/Eden's quest to determine the truth of whether or not her birth parents were serial killers. In the first volume, they were cleared of killing one couple, but that still leaves three others. Olivia (we'll stick with that for the rest of the review because it's the name she prefers) also struggles to balance her relationship with her MBA student/biker boyfriend, Ricky, and her complicated friendship with Gabriel, her lawyer, her employer, and your basic broody Gothic hero as she learns more about her otherworldly heritage.
There's something compelling here, both in the murder investigation plot and in the characters, particularly Gabriel, as annoying as he is. Which is incredibly annoying, and yet for some reason I am still completely on Team Gabriel(TM) in spite of the fact that there is a part of my brain that is so, so sick of damaged broody men who can't let themselves get too close to people or really even acknowledge that they want to when it's incredibly obvious that they do. It's probably a Rochester thing, a friends-to-lovers thing, or a combination of the two. I love the archetype and yet I also really hate how much of the archetype he is.
But, like I think I've seen these characters before, I feel like I've read this book before, too. We learn some more information about the murders, but I don't feel like this book ends in that much of a different place than where it begins. Part of this is that the big new things than our main characters learn about the fae world are things that I thought were a given based on visions that Olivia had in the previous book. Over and over again in this series, I find myself realizing things a good half of a book ahead of Olivia and wondering if the reader is meant to be ahead of her or if they were intended to be surprises, but weren't really as subtle as they were meant to be.
I would have finished reading this book even if I were at home and didn't have a limited number of books at hand. For that matter, I still plan to read the next one in the series. I do want to know to what extent this series goes the way I think it will be going.
Overall: B-