Kate Reilly once had a normal job as a bonded courier and looked after her brother Bryan, who had tangled with the drug Eden and ended up as little better than a vegetable.
All that changed when a man named Tom moved into the apartment house she owned. Tom was tall, gorgeous, a fireman... and also a werewolf. Kate wasn't exactly a standard human herself, having psychic powers, which made her a target for a vampiric entity called the Brood. The Brood feed off humans, possess a hive-like mind, and view someone like Kate O'Reilly as a candidate to become a hive queen. Kate was infected with the hive, but cut out the seeds of her infection and fought off the hive, earning the appellation "not-Prey". Theoretically, this should have made her free from hive attacks, but her ex-boyfriend, Dylan, had met another woman, a thrall of the hive, and made him a thrall, too.
Later, she and Tom fell in love, and managed to bring Bryan back to being his old self, as well as fighting off another hive attack. Afterwards, Tom asked Kate to marry him, over the disapproval of his packmates. It seems that Kate, in fighting off the Thrall infection, and contact with the blood of a Thrall Queen, had rendered herself infertile. As Tom is a handsome and attractive young werewolf, not to mention fertile, the pack frowned on the idea of their marriage.
Still going ahead with the idea of her marriage, she and Tom make plans to fly to Las Vegas and get a quickie marriage, then come back to her hometown for an actual church wedding. But a winter storm and the collapse of her apartment house make her have to travel to Las Vegas earlier than Kate had planned, as well as leaving her with nowhere to live.
But the Thrall are up to something, and her old lover is at the heart of it. Kate's first inkling of trouble comes when she realizes that the Thrall Queens are deliberately shutting her out. Then, after her friend Dusty has her baby, the Thrall try to kidnap it, and Kate is only barely able to prevent it. But that's not her only worry. Tom's former leader of the pack, or Acca, has been ousted, and the woman who has taken her place is not only hostile to Kate personally, she is also Tom's former girlfriend, whom he left because she was too intense. Apparently, if Janine can't have Tom, she prefers to let no one have him, and when she first meets Kate, she attacks her on sight and is only prevented from killing her by Las Vegas airport security.
Her attack gets Janine arrested, but Mary, the former Acca, begs Kate not to press charges, saying that this is something that must be taken care of within the pack, and as the Conclave of all the Pack Accas is soon to meet, it would be harder to do so if Janine was in jail. Also, it might cause the other Accas to vote against Kate's marriage.
Soon it becomes apparent that despite Kate's "Not Prey" status, that the Thrall are targetting her for attacks, hoping to kill her. The Thrall have been getting good press since they began helping drug users who became "Eden Zombies" regain their consciousness, so people are more ready to believe that Kate is unfairly persecuting the Thrall rather than that the Thrall have an ulterior motive. But Brian, who is one of those Kate helped to bring back to life, has found out the people whom the Thrall brought back on their own are not the same as they were before. What could they be planning? And why is Kate's old lover Dylan behind the change in the Thrall? And more importantly, what twisted idea is behind his takeover of not only the Thrall hive in the city, but all the other thrall hives as well? Can Kate keep the people she loves safe as the Thrall take on their most ambitious plan yet?
This novel was mostly good, although you'll notice that the Thrall become much more pro-active in this novel, and Kate spends a goodly amount of time in hospitals, getting healed, sewn up and put back together from all her various misadventures. But in a way, it was a bit *too* much. The novel appeared to be thrown together to be the last in the series, and so we must revisit all of Kate's friends and family, and they all must come together in the end whilst simultaneously removing all threat of the Thrall and giving Kate a close to perfect "Happily Ever After".
And it was just too much to cram into one book. I found the "ending all threat of the Thrall" part of the book to cause my "suspension of disbelief" to fail in a BIG way. Personally, I feel that it should not have been as easy as it was to take all the Thrall out in one blow like that, and I found myself staring at the book in shock and horror, going, "How convenient!" The ending was almost... anticlimactic, after that moment, and it really ruined the entire series for me, which is sad, as up to this last book, it was great.
In short, too much story and too many past characters got crammed into this book for the sake of closure. All the story threads are wrapped up so neatly in the end that I expected to see s fancy department store bow! But no matter how neat the wrapping and tying, it felt rushed and the ending of the Thrall was extremely unconvincing. Not a book I'll be recommending to my friends any time soon.
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