A war is going on in this world and the spirit world as supernaturals take sides for and against the revelation of their existence to the human race and demons pick teams. Savannah Levine has rescued her brother Bryce from testing, but he has been injected with a virus that may yet kill him. Savannah's once exceptional magic powers are coming back after having been taken at the end of Waking the Witch but they're still shaky, and creatures are entering our world that are not supposed to be able to cross over.
I loved all of the family relationships in this book. Savannah's mother Eve, who was a witch and a half-demon and has become a part-time angel since her death, is called back into the world in the flesh to be reunited with her daughter for the first time since Savannah was twelve. Eve's book, Haunted, was in its way a story about parents letting their children go as they grow up. A large part of this book was about a mother and daughter forming an adult relationship, and although both of these women have magic powers and one of them isn't technically alive, it's still quite relate-able. Watching the demons get involved in the lives of their children and grandchildren was also good for a lot of fun; mostly they see their mortal descendents as tools or pawns in their own battles, but Lucifer seems to genuinely care for his daughter Hope, who gets abducted by the villain in hopes to use her to lure him there, and for the new granddaughter that she has at the end of the story.
I've never cared for the concept of Savannah and Adam as a couple, not so much because of the age difference as because I can't believe that a woman of twenty-one would still be in love with the same guy she's had an unrequited crush on since age twelve. People grow and change in their teens and in their twenties, and I'd think that nine years later either her taste in men would be different or he would be different. But I'm resigned to it by now, and I do like the way they interact in this book, half new lovebirds, half longtime couple that's used to each other, and both thoroughly confident in each other's abilities.
What did bother me was when Lucifer told Hope that her daughter, Nita, would take some of her power, partly because it just didn't make sense to me that Nita would only have the visions but not the chaos hunger because the latter is a side effect of living with demons. Hope didn't live with demons, Lucifer did, but Hope inherited the chaos hunger from him. But what bothered me more was that although Nita wouldn't have the chaos hunger herself, her taking some of Hope's powers would reduce her chaos hunger. It seemed to me uncomfortably as if Hope had been "fixed" by motherhood. I'm uncomfortable with pretty much all of Bitten in all its stalkerish dub-con glory, so I can't really say that this came completely out of nowhere, although most of the series is much better and not icky. But since it wasn't Hope's book, one paragraph about her didn't mess it up too badly for me.
Overall Grade: A-