Review: Kitty and the Midnight Hour - Carrie Vaughn

Kitty Norville is a midnight-shift DJ for a Denver radio station - and a werewolf in secret.  Sick of lame song requests, she accidentally starts "The Midnight Hour", a late-night talk show for the supernaturally disadvantaged.

After desperate vampires, werewolves and witches across the country begin calling in to share their woes, her new show is a raging success.  But it's Kitty who can use some help.  With one sexy werewolf hunter and a few homicidal undead on her trail, Kitty may have bitten off more than she can chew...

Kitty Norville Series:
Kitty and the Midnight Hour
Kitty Goes to Washington
Kitty Takes a Holiday
Kitty and the Silver Bullet
The Arcane Art of Misdirection (Novella in the Hex Appeal anthology)
Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand
Kitty Raises Hell
Kitty's House of Horrors
Kitty Goes to War
Kitty's Big Trouble
Kitty Steals the Show
Kitty Rocks the House
Kitty in the Underworld
Low Midnight
Kitty Saves the World

Visit Carrie Vaughn's website for more information

Review:
This is the first book in Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norville series & what a great start to a series it is.  Kitty is a late-night DJ and one evening she inadvertantly manages to turn her show into a supernatural talk show.  This has hilarious results & I just love some of the calls she takes throughout the book.  There are plenty of people who aren't happy with the way the show has changed though - her pack, the local vampire family and a werewolf hunter to name just a few.  On top of that Kitty, who is now known as the local expert on all things supernatural, is asked to consult for the police on a spate of killings possibly committed by a werewolf.

At the start of the book Kitty is definitely at the bottom of her pack and completely submissive to the other pack members.  She looks to the pack Alpha Carl and his second in command T.J. for protection and is incapable of standing on her own 2 feet.  Throughout the book as her radio show gains popularity we see Kitty become more confident and start to question the pack and her place within it.  I really enjoyed seeing the growth that her character goes through and am sure she will continue with this throughout the series.  I found it quite refreshing to have a heroine who was unsure of herself but her submissive side would have been irritating if it had gone on for much longer.

One of the things I loved about this book was the way Carrie Vaughn described the experience of being a werewolf and the pack dynamics.  The way she used body language with the pack members was really well done, particularly the way this spread across into their human side.  I also found it interesting the way Kitty thought of her wolf side like it was a completely seperate entity giving a whole new meaning to the term split personality.

Overall I really loved this book - it had plently of action, the storyline was fast paced & kept you gripped, the characters were well developed & I loved the added comedy.  If it was lacking in anything I would have liked a little more romance but with Rick & Cormac on the scene I'm pretty sure that this will be something that will be added more as the series progresses.  I'm looking forward to seeing more of both of those characters & can't wait to see what happens to Kitty next.

Source: Purchased

Other Reviews:
Trisha's Book Blog
The Eclectic Reader
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