Book Banter -- Blood on the Bayou

Title: Blood on the Bayou (Annabelle Lee, bk. 2) (ARC)
Author: Stacey Jay
Genre: Urban fantasy
Length: 413 pages
Where Word Nerd's Copy Came From: ARC from Simon and Schuster
Plot Basics: Hard-drinking Annabelle Lee is barely recovered from her first big encounter with faeries and is called once again with her immunity to their venom and her magic to pursue truths she'd rather leave alone. This time, it's an ex-boyfriend doing the asking. Annabelle knows helping could bring relationship disasters -- especially when the gorgeous and sometimes-invisible-man Tucker keeps popping in and out of her life -- but friends are hard to turn down. But lies, she learns, can run far deeper than the swampy water of the delta...

Banter Points: Work recently sent me to the City by the Bay  for a conference and with a long plane ride ahead of me, I settled in with this ARC. I normally don't like jumping into a sequel, but the characters and the setting was so vivid that it didn't matter. While I missed some references, sure, the story of this book was intriguing on its own to keep me turning pages. Annabelle was a great new entry in the heavily populated world of urban fantasy heroines, her hard-drinking tendencies were a new twist on the girl-not-having-her-life-together trope.

And -- it was a new urban fantasy world! While others have done fairies (I'm thinking Laurell Hamilton's Merry Gentry series here) they were again, the objects of the romance, a human equivalent. But Jay's fairies are scary, swarming things that have had a real impact on the world since they appeared.

Bummer Points: At the beginning (or maybe from the first book), I missed character descriptions, so I spent a good deal of the book wondering what people looked like and then being surprised by the descriptions when they were finally referenced again.

Word Nerd Recommendation: I've gone back to find book 1 (Dead on the Delta) and I'm a fan of this urban fantasy series and pushing it on unsuspecting friends. You've been warned.

Bonus: Check back on Wednesday, when Stacey Jay will be "here" for a Q&A.