Pros: For what it is, this is an engaging and absorbing read with fun characters
Cons: The genre itself will put some people off at this point; don’t make this the first book in the series that you read
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Review book courtesy of Penguin Group
The Kyndred are seemingly ordinary people who’ve been genetically enhanced using vampire DNA. A company named GenHance will do anything to get its hands on the modified genes of these people. Lilah, a woman with a gift for communicating with animals, wakes up to find herself in the back of a refrigerated truck, handcuffed to a half-dead soldier named Walker. If the two of them don’t escape and find a safe haven, they’ll both end up dead. The quaint rural town they stumble upon, however, has its own secrets to hide.
Don’t make this the first Kyndred novel you read. Even though I read one of the Darkyn novels a couple of years ago, I found a number of aspects of Frostfire
As much as I enjoyed that Darkyn novel that I read, and can still enjoy a well-written novel that includes vampires or shifters despite their current ubiquity, this book did suffer from the sheer variety and number of currently popular paranormal entities it tried to include. Shifters (despite a rather unique and delightful history), vampires, genetically enhanced humans… when enough such things get added in, it starts to get difficult to tell such a world apart from other authors’ similarly overpopulated worlds.
Lynn Viehl has a strong sense of character to help make up for this, however. She writes some interesting characters, who are much easier to tell apart than the myriad organizations and groups they belong to. Lilah and Walker have good chemistry, if not the most amazing I’ve seen, and there are definitely some sizzling sex scenes in Frostfire!
This isn’t a book I’d grab off of a shelf and use as an intro to Ms. Viehl’s work, but I think if you’re already reading the Kyndred novels then you’ll find it quite satisfying.
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