This book is a high speed contextless supernatural swirl of text. It almost demands you have read the first book in order to understand what is going on. The plot picks up immediately from the ending of the last one and dives straight in to the actions of the characters…and there are a lot of characters to try and work out who is what species or who is dating or fighting whom and why are they doing what they are doing and after a while it really doesn’t make any sense any more.

So, we have an academy for angels, run by a vampire, as well as having werewolves and witches and demons and mutagens (who may or may not be the werewolves, it was difficult to tell) and DAOs or Demon Angel Offspring. There may be others, but I also noticed a distinct lack of humans anywhere. The main lead is the vampire Cade, whose father Liam runs the academy, surviving the effects of a vampire virus designed to kill them. He is trying to rally together a variety of forces to prevent worldwide extinction at the hands of DAOs and the supersoldiers that were created somehow. One of the supersoldiers has his spine removed in a fight, don’t worry he gets better. We have various members of the academy going off to rescue other members, including those who get left behind on earlier missions. And then we have the person who created the DAOs who is trying to run and hide, keeping his lover and their child alive. It’s…it’s all very confusing for the majority of the book.

This book is crying out for a précis, just something, anything that could give an idea of what happened before it rushed headlong into the story. The characters are very action focused on the here and now as we run from one action scene to the next. The plot makes little to no sense without the context as people rush hither and thither doing things because they know what they need to do, even if it is not really explained to the reader. There also appear to be crossover with some of the author’s other works, and I have no idea how many of those would also need to be read to give the extra detail to help make this make sense.

The problem is that there is good book here struggling to get out. But it’s lost in the whirring blur of plot running past it. There is a lot of love, hate and passion between the characters, but because we are rushed into knowing them, there is little to understand and in some ways even care about them. Each chapter focuses from the viewpoint of one of the main characters, and in general it suffices. Hearing their inner thoughts in some sections, also works really well and helps provide the insight to get to know them, but it’s only for those characters. It’s a shame because as there are so many characters, that they got lost as they come and go and there is no reason to think about them once they are out of the sight of the lead character at that time. Spelling and grammar are fine, only a couple of things I found, but overall the writing quality was good, which is all the more disheartening.

Just for curiousity, I looked at the start of the first book, where time was being taken to explain who people were, what they were doing, what their background was and the slower tempo worked really well. But it does mean that this one is purely for fans of the first book book only. There is a third book coming out, but unless it comes with something to guide people into it, they are going to be lost.