My name is Gin, and I kill people.
They call me the Spider. I'm the most feared assassin in the South — when I'm not busy at the Pork Pit cooking up the best barbecue in Ashland. As a Stone elemental, I can hear everything from the whispers of the gravel beneath my feet to the vibrations of the soaring Appalachian Mountains above me. My Ice magic also comes in handy for making the occasional knife. But I don't use my powers on the job unless I absolutely have to. Call it professional pride.
Now that a ruthless Air elemental has double-crossed me and killed my handler, I'm out for revenge. And I'll exterminate anyone who gets in my wayCaine has agreed to help me. The last thing this coldhearted killer needs when I'm battling a magic more powerful than my own is a sexy distraction...especially when Donovan wants me dead just as much as the enemy.So the first chapter of the book is so amazing that I have to post at least the opening lines:
“My name is Gin, and I kill people.”
Normally, my confession would have elicited gasps of surprise. Pale faces. Nervous sweat. Stifled screams. An overturned chair or two as people scrambled to get away before I buried a knife in their heart—or back. A sucking wound was a sucking wound. I wasn’t picky about where I caused it.
“Hi, Gin,” four people chorused back to me in perfect, dull, monotone unison.
But not in this place. Within the walled confines of Ashland Asylum, my confession, true though it might be, didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow, much less shock and frightened awe. I was relatively normal compared to the freaks of nature and magic who populated the grounds. Like Jackson, the seven-foot-tall albino giant seated to my left who drooled worse than a mastiff and gurgled like a three-month-old child.This 1) made me laugh rather manically and 2) immediately sucked me into the Elemental Assassin Series. The premise of Jennifer Estep's urban fantasy series takes no prisoners. In this world there are vampires, giants, dwarfes and elementals. Elementals have the ability to control an element such as air, water, fire or stone as well as off shoots such as lightning, metal etc. Gin Blanco is the main character of the series, an elemental assassin whose day job is as cook at the Pork Pit a local bbq restaurant.
Gin is a very strong main character (my kind of woman), who is somewhat jaded to the world. While she is an assassin, she does not enjoy killing people but only sees it as a career choice. She is witty and quick witha strong sense of loyalty to her friends and family. As the back cover explains, Gin wants revenge after her mentor and handler is brutally murdered. Her partner in crime is Finnegan Lane, her handler's son. The two strike out into corrupt Ashland looking for the murdered.
I don't want to give out any more spoilers, since I would not be able to do the plot justice, The character development is great and the action allows the plot to move very nicely. There are no parts that one gets bogged down. The only annoyance I had was the
I would definitely recommend this read, and afterwards you will definitely want to read the other books in the series.
Rating: 4.5/5
Arianna