Signatures of the Dead by Faith Hunter.
A rogue group of vampires are loose, killing and torturing people every night. Molly Trueblood, an earth witch, and her friend, Jane Yellowrock, need to find the rogue vampires before they strike again.
I enjoyed Signatures Of The Dead. It had a constant flow of action scenes that progressed naturally within the plot till the very end. Something was always happening, but it wasn’t busy or chaotic. Molly’s power was very heavy, in the sense that every time she uses it, she gets bruised emotionally. Molly is able to sense what happened at death. She can read murder scenes and she is able to feel the victim’s pain, shock and the death inflicted by the murderer. I liked Molly, but her personality wasn’t shown as strongly or effectively as Jane Yellowrock’s character, and Molly is the narrator of the story. Jane is definitely someone I want to read about – the scene in which Faith Hunter describe the shifts was beautifully written. Luckily, I have Jane’s book: Skinwalker in my TBR pile.
This story isn’t a light read, and the ending is sort of bitter-sweet and very emotional as we see the characters wrung out emotionally and physically.
I give Signatures Of The Dead 4 out of 5.
Ginger by Caitlin Kittredge
Sunny Swann is a witch, but she’s no where near as strong, physically and mentally, as her werewolf cousin, Luna, who is a police detective. While watching Luna in court one day, Sunny has to use her powers against someone who is dead set on murdering everyone in the court room. After the event, Sunny receives a strange phone call, from someone who has expressed a keen interest in her. While figuring out what they want with her, and doing some work for the police, Sunny ends up being kidnapped. How will Sunny get out of her predicament?
Ok, I have to admit this was a DNF for me. In the beginning, originally, I thought it was refreshing seeing a heroine openly admit to not being brave and taking a back seat rather than getting involved. This then got annoying when Sunny does something so completely stupid. While wearing an earpiece, which feed backs information to Luna and the police, she takes off the sound piece because Luna and the other police officer are arguing ( about something so inconsequential that it was just silly) Then, in the next scene, where Sunny is kidnapped, reading about her her crying and sniffling, while a child who was also kidnapped, is comforting her made me roll my eyes and skip right to the next story. The writing is not bad, but the heroine is just a complete numpty head. Sorry, but it was a DNF.
Dark Sins by Jenna Maclaine
Again, this was more of a TBF aka to be finished. I started reading it, but I found myself losing interest and I haven’t been able to pick up the book since. I liked the characters, and I would actually think about reading the series that the characters are featured, but my interest just waned and I couldn’t make myself finish.
Overall, Strange Brew is one of the better anthologies out there. I enjoyed most of the stories, but there were a few that didn’t press the right buttons for me.
So, my overall rating for Strange Brew is 4 out of 5.