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One More Bite (a Jaz Parks novel book 5) by Jennifer Rardin (book review).

‘One More Bite’ is book five of a series of eight full length books and a handful of short stories about Jaz Parks, released in 2009. Jennifer Rardin unfortunately died suddenly, so there will be no more books in this series.

OneMoreBite

As usual, we are following Jaz and her vampire hottie boss, Vayl, and also along for the ride this time is Albert, Jaz’s estranged father. As Jaz hasn’t told her father that she is dating Vayl and who is also vampire, a species Albert dislikes intensely, this causes some friction amongst the party. Oh, and to make things extra interesting, Cole is included in the party as well. Cole happens to be completely in love with Jaz and is still trying to get her to fall in love with him. Along with all this, Jaz and her party are meant to be protecting a Scidairian witch who has recently been working with Edward ‘The Raptor’ Samos, a big baddie that Jaz smoked (literally) in the last book, ‘Bitten To Death’. Someone has taken a hit out on this particular Scidairian and, weirdly, Jaz has to protect her in order to keep the balance of baddies as ordered by her CIA bosses. The Scidairian coven happens to live in the wilds of Scotland and are currently taking part in a ghost hunting conference, so off to Scotland Jaz and her party go!

As I’ve mentioned, Jaz is meant to be protecting a Scidairian witch, but I haven’t explained what that is. Basically it is a type of witch that follows Scidair, who was a sorceress who became Satan’s concubine in the afterlife. Her followers on Earth enjoy taking lives in order to prolong their own lives and it seems to work with many of her followers being hundreds of years old. Of course, they’re highly evil and unpleasant people to be around which makes it hard for Jaz and her colleagues to protect one of them.

I have to say that these books do cause me a lot of confusion as Jaz seems to be able to hop between different planes of existence and also has a lot of different voices living in her head. This means that sometimes I wasn’t sure where she was, was she in her dream or in the Thin or in real life? The Thin is a place between our world and heaven/hell kind of like limbo where spirits can sometimes get stuck which means that they can come back to Earth to haunt. Then you get all the different voices of the different versions of Jaz there are in her head, along with her grandmother. All in all, I did get really confused at times and just took the way of reading the book whether it made sense or not because I was sure it would all make sense in the end. To be fair, it mostly did make sense, but sometimes it took a lot more thinking than other urban fantasy series I’m currently reading.

I did enjoy one particular relationship in this book and that was between Jaz and her father. To give a bit of history, they haven’t really seen eye-to-eye or even very much of each other for quite a long time. In this book, Albert finds out why Jaz is quite so pissed at him and they seem to mend some of the bridges between them. I don’t think they’ll ever completely trust each other but they do seem to have become a little more understanding of each other, which I really enjoyed. On the other hand, I didn’t really enjoy the romantic relationship between Jaz and Vayl, it just made me feel uncomfortable as this isn’t a relationship I feel I can get behind unfortunately.

Overall, I would like to read the rest of the books in the series as there aren’t many left and I’d like to see how everything turns out, but I am prepared to be highly confused in the process.

Sarah Bruch

December 2014

follow me @shelbycat

(pub: Orbit. 312 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-84149-709-9)

check out websites: www.orbitbooks.net and www.JenniferRardin.com

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