CLAIMED BY SHADOW

Author: Karen Chance ISBN: 0451461525 4/2007 PARANORMAL Publisher: ROC

A recent legacy made Cassandra Palmer heir to the title of Pythia, the world's chief clairvoyant. It's a position that usually comes with years of training, but Cassie's circumstances are a little...unusual. Now she's stuck with a whopping amount of power that every vamp, fey, and mage in town wants to either monopolize or eradicate-and that she herself doesn't dare use. What's more, she's just discovered that a certain arrogant master vampire has a geis on her—a magical claim that warns off any would-be suitors, and might also explain the rather ... intense attraction between them. But Cassie's had it with being jerked around, and anyone who tries it from now on is going to find out that she makes a very bad enemy...

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

CLAIMED BY SHADOW is a wonderfully sexy paranormal that gets right down to business from the first scene. Cassie, our heroine, is a kick-butt clairvoyant who has acquired the ability to time travel, along with becoming the new Pythia. The only problem—she has no control over her newest power just yet. In the beginning of the book, she is being thrown back and forth between different times and places to the point that I couldn't even keep up! She knows that something doesn't feel right about some of the things she has been going through lately, and she engages in a partnership with her enemy, Pritkin, to go to Faerie, which I like to think of as a paranormal stomping ground, so to speak, to find out what is happening. This is where the book gets really fun.

The writing is clever, the characters are great and we meet so many different forms of paranormal beings, it was all just a lot of fun for me. The secondary characters really brought this story to life as well. What a wacky lot they are, but I loved them just as much as Cassie did—Casanova, Pritkin, Billy, Tomas... doesn't that last name just give you the chills??!!

My only complaint with the entire book is that the beginning five chapters were confusing for me. I hadn't read the first book in the series, so I felt like I missed something as Cassie was time traveling all over and I couldn't keep track. It took me about five chapters to really understand what was going on, but once I did, I really enjoyed the story.

All the great characters, the quirky happenings, the wonderful relationships that Cassie has with all of the secondary characters, it all adds up to make one heck of a great story in CLAIMED BY SHADOW!

Kristal Gorman