Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden series:
- Ill Wind – 4 stars
- Heat Stroke – 4 stars
- Chill Factor – 4 stars
- Windfall – 5 stars
- Firestorm – 5 stars
- Thin Air – 5 stars
I first learned about these books from one of those if-you-liked-this-you-might-also-like-these promotions from Amazon, with regard to Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series, which as you know I love. I picked up the first one, read a few pages, thought it would be amusing, and bought it. One near-sleepless week later, I closed the back cover on the 6th of I don’t know how many books. I got sucked in in a way I haven’t been in a while. Fast paced, ferociously entertaining, though at times a bit fluffy, the Weather Warden series is skillfully-written, innovative, and simply unputdownable. The series gets better as it goes on (with Windfall being the best of the series so far, I think), though I confess I am becoming a bit tired of the dun-dun-DUN! surprises—to be fair, this may also be a function of me reading all of these too close to one another.
I like Caine’s way of getting her characters out of one bad situation only to dump them into a worse one, but as I said, it does become a bit wearying after a while. That said, these books are supremely enjoyable, and a worthy addition to one of my (surprisingly) new favorite subgenres: the urban fantasy.
It’s strange; though these books aren’t as well written as Briggs’ Mercy Thompson books, nor (and this is the important thing) as well plotted, I gave them an average rating higher than the Briggs books. The 4 and 5-star ratings for me are largely emotional, and though technical excellence will usually net a book a 4, I’ve really got to have an emotional connection with the book to push it up to that 5. Now that I think about it, though, the Briggs books really are better than these, as well as emotionally engaging, so I think I’ll have to revise their ratings up to 5.