Spider’s Bite by Jennifer Estep

Narrated by Lauren Fortgang

I knew Spider’s Bite was urban fantasy going in. So I wasn’t expecting a lot of romance, this being the first book in a long running series, Elemental Assassin. I have enjoyed other urban fantasy series where the romance takes a while to get going (Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels, Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson) so I didn’t think it would be a problem for me to enjoy this book. I’m not sure this review will be very helpful because I can’t put my finger exactly on why this story was only okay for me.

The narration is excellent. Lauren Fortgang doesn’t have a super deep male character voice, but her characterizations are so good and, apart from a few odd pauses where full stops are not in sentences, I can’t fault it really.

But I found myself taking a long time to listen to this one. I didn’t hate it but it didn’t grab me. I wasn’t engaged in the story and I didn’t care enough about the characters. Yet it’s difficult to explain why – I’m not sure I know.

Gin Blanco is an assassin in an alternate universe Earth where giants, dwarves, humans, and “elementals” live in relative harmony. Elementals have magic involving a particular “element” (it’s not the periodic table use of elements though) – fire, stone, air, and ice. There are sub-elements too – such as metal. Gin is a stone elemental with some small talent in ice also. Her family was murdered when she was a child by an unknown fire elemental and she then lived on the streets for a while until she was taken in by Fletcher Lane, the owner of the Pork Pit barbecue restaurant and assassin. She grew up with Fletcher’s son, Finnegan, and eventually followed in Fletcher’s footsteps as an assassin. She is “the Spider”.

When a job goes wrong, Gin is set up to take the fall for something she didn’t do and Fletcher is horribly murdered. She and Finnegan set out to find the elemental responsible and to do so, they team up with human cop Donovan Caine. He is one of the few policemen in the city who is not corrupt.

There is a strong attraction between Donovan and Gin but she is an assassin (and she killed his police partner) and he is a “good guy” so it does seem their problems are insurmountable. Certainly they are for one book only. While I believed the physical attraction between Gin and Donovan, I didn’t feel much of the romance and I wasn’t sure what connected them apart from murder and lust.

Gin is a strong character, tough and kickass, but with a sympathetic backstory. She’s not quite the assassin with the heart of gold however. She’s darker than that.

All the elements (pardon the pun) were present for a great story but I felt disconnected from it for some reason which left me feeling a bit “meh” about the whole thing. I did read the blurbs for future books and that probably didn’t help actually.

The narration stood out. Ms. Fortgang’s mild southern twang was just right for the setting and she did more to “humanize” Gin than I think I would have found in print.

The production quality was excellent and there were only a very few mistakes – as mentioned above, sometimes there was a full stop-like pause in the middle of a sentence. But it was fairly rare and didn’t detract from the listening experience.

I feel that if anyone could have had me engaged it would have been this narrator and I’m certainly keen to listen to her again. But the story just didn’t grab me. I wonder if I just struggled with an assassin heroine?

The series is very popular and for those who don’t mind a darker heroine or those who have read the books, the audiobooks will be absolute winners. I didn’t hate it by any means but I was left a bit cold by the story. In the end, I think it just wasn’t for me. But it will be a keeper shelf gem for many others.

Kaetrin

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Narration:  B+

Book Content:  C

Steam Factor:  Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence:  Graphic

Genre:  Urban Fantasy

Publisher:   Brilliance Audio

 

Spider’s Bite was provided to AudioGals for review by Brilliance Audio.

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