With vampire and supernatural fiction all the rage right now, I have found the one series I can tolerate in high doses: Kim Harrison‘s Hallows series. In this series, Rachel Morgan is a witch, partnered with a living vampire and a pixie, who is dedicated to bringing the baddies down. It’s quite the fun series, cleverly written with characters who are actually multi-dimensional and worthwhile.

I’m giving you this brief summary because her newest–A Pure Blood–came out this past month and I finally got around to reading it. Once again, the plot was engaging, the action breathtaking, and I have the urge to scream at Hollywood to make them into movies. The premise of this particular novel (not to give anything away) is that a group akin to the Klu Klux Klan (here called HAPA and against all persons magical) is kidnapping witches and horribly mutating their bodies with a curse. And although her magic is currently stunted, by her own choice, Rachel is blackmailed into helping solve these crimes by the magical version of the FBI.

It was a roller coaster from beginning to end, though I was saddened by the lack of my favorite character, Al the demon. Of course, Rachel is currently blocking her magic to hide from her mentor, so it makes sense he’s not around much for this story. I still missed him. Though the budding understanding and relationship between Rachel and Trent almost made up for it. I’ve thought from the beginning that they’d make an awesome, if slightly contentious, couple.

I did, however, have a bit of a jarring entrance into the novel. I have been reading so much high literature lately that coming back to a novel written entirely for a mainstream audience hit a little hard. The amount of adjectives in this book would feed a thesaurus-rex for a month. It didn’t really interfere with my reading, once I got into the writing style again, but it was an interesting realization.

So, if you’re enamored with the vampire lit phenomena, or just looking for a good supernatural thriller, Harrison’s Hollows series is a better bet than most. Very fun, passably well written, and with a fantastic depth of character and plot that is not often found in the genre.