Book Review: Kitty‘s Big Trouble (Kitty Norville, #9) by Carrie Vaughn
Kitty‘s Big Trouble (Kitty Norville, #9) by Carrie Vaughn. © 2011 Tor. ISBN 9780765365651. Mass Media Paperback. Urban Fantasy. 320 pages. Source: ARC provided by the publishers.
Back Cover Blurb: Kitty Norville is back and in more trouble than ever. Her recent run-in with werewolves traumatized by the horrors of war has made her start wondering how long the United States government might have been covertly using werewolves in combat. Have any famous names in our own history been actually supernatural? She’s got suspicions about William Tecumseh Sherman. Then … an interview with the right vampire puts her on the trail of Wyatt Earp, vampire hunter.
But her investigations lead her to a clue about the enigmatic vampire Romance and the mysterious Long Game played by vampires through the millennia. That clue, plus a call from a powerful vampire in San Francisco, suddenly puts Kitty and her friends on the supernatural chessboard, turning them into pieces in a dangerously active play. But Kitty Norville is never content to be a pawn…
Review: The “Kitty Norville” series is excellent in the way that it’s almost episodic. Yet while Kitty’s Big Trouble has lots of fantastic action and draws in bits from previous books—giving us that overarching episodic feel—I can’t say that I loved this installment.
It was enjoyable but it just felt weird in places and I found myself putting it down several times (I even think I read a couple of books before coming back to it). Kitty is in a completely new world—one hidden within, or rather underneath, San Francisco—full of Chinese mythology where she discovers even more supernatural creatures to wrap her head around. Good, but not crazy good and probably my least favorite of the series thus far. Still, this remains my favorite series and I’m really looking forward to #10! 3/5.
Back Cover Blurb: Kitty Norville, alpha werewolf and host of The Midnight Hour, a radio call-in show, is contacted by a friend at the NIH’s center for the Study of Paranatural Biology. Three army soldiers recently returned from the war in Afghanistan are being held at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. They’re killer werewolves–and post-traumatic stress has left them unable to control their shape-shifting and unable to interact with people. Kitty agrees to see them, hoping to help by bringing them into her pack.
Synopsis: After defeating the djinn summoned by the vengeful vampire priestess she encountered in Vegas, and making a few unexpected friends in the Paradox PI team, we re-join Kitty Norville—late-night radio show host and the world’s first celebrity werewolf—a year later back at the KNOB station in Denver, Colorado.
Synopsis: When we last saw celeb werewolf Kitty Norville, she had been confronted by an enigmatic word—Tiamat—burned into the door of her beloved restaurant and pack hangout, New Moon. It was then she learned that the gauche cliché of “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” is nothing more than a lie. But the brand on the door was only the beginning. Soon, danger and murder surround Kitty’s life and she is faced with an even bigger evil that forces her own view of the supernatural to broaden.
They’ve won their freedom, become the new alpha couple in town, struck a deal of equality with the city’s vampires, opened a new restaurant (aptly named New Moon) and now Kitty and Ben are going to make it all official—the human way at least—by tying the knot. Deciding they are overwhelmed by all the matrimonial hoopla, the couple make a plan to elope in, where else but, Las Vegas, Nevada—the city of neon temples, Wayne Newton, drunken mistakes and Elvis impersonators.
She traveled to Washington D.C. where she mingled with vampires and was eventually captured and forced into shapeshifting on live national television (
That’s exactly what Kitty Norville does in this series’ third installment. However, being secluded in the Colorado wilderness with only your laptop and some trees for company, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and soon her attempt to recreate Walden Pond soon fails. Wolf is at home, Kitty is not.
Kitty’s best friend has died and now it looks like her life is next on the chopping block. Nothing left to do but run, and take The Midnight Hour with her by doing the show from various different locales in hopes of avoiding her old pack which she rebelled against. Kitty then gets word that she has been requested by the Senate to testify on behalf of all supernatural beings in Washington D.C. So, it’s to the capital she goes.
