New Paranormal Novels

After recent trips to San Francisco and NYC, I got back in town in time to see the Dark Days panel of authors at Barnes and Noble last weekend.  Jocelyn Davies was there promoting A Beautiful Dark, which involves angels. Claudia Gray, the author of the Evernight vampire series, has a new book entitled Fateful about werewolves on the Titanic. Kierstan White brought Supernaturally, her sequel to Paranormalcy, and read from her draft for Endlessly, the final book in the trilogy. Finally, romance novelist Amy Garvey talked about Cold Kiss, a zombie novel, which is her first book for young adults.

Jocelyn Davies is an editor of young adult books and coincidentally edited books in Claudia Gray's Evernight series. A Beautiful Dark is the first book in a new series about angels.  Sky, an orphan who is living in Colorado with a friend of her deceased parents, has little knowledge of her parents' history.  When Asher and Devin, two boys with unearthly powers, arrive in town, they both seem to know more about her past than she does and are determined to protect her. As she approaches her seventeenth birthday, her legacy is about to be revealed.

Claudia Gray's Evernight series involves a Romeo and Juliet type romance between a vampire and a vampire hunter.  Bianca attends the Evernight Academy, whose student body includes closeted vampires. There she meets Lucas, the son of the leader of the Black Cross, a group of vampire hunters. Lucas and Bianca fall in love, just as her vampire powers are emerging. Balthazar, the fifth book in the Evernight series, will come out in the Spring.  Claudia was at Barnes and Noble to publicize Fateful, which has a unique twist on the Titanic story. Tess is a ladies' maid, who is drawn to Alec, a first class passenger with a dark secret. He is a werewolf who is trying to defy his nature, but the Brotherhood, a powerful werewolf clan, is after him.  They want to capitalize on his cachet as the heir to a steel company. In addition to the werewolf romance, Claudia includes rich historical detail about classism on the Titanic.

Paranormalcy, the first book in Kierstan White's new trilogy, introduces sixteen-year-old Evie who works for the International Paranormal Containment Agency, an organization that “bags and tags” paranormal beings. She has the unique ability to see past their glamours. When she finds herself attracted to Lend, a captured shape shifter who has lived in the normal world, she begins to see the allure of a normal teenage life. Kierstan has set up a framework to include a variety of paranormal beings.  In the sequel Supernaturally, unicorns are introduced and in Endlessly, the final book in the series, she adds dragons. 

Amy Garvey, a former romance writer, introduced her new YA novel, Cold Kiss, an unconventional zombie novel.  Wren, who has magical powers, is devastated when her boyfriend Danny dies in a car accident, and she raises him from the dead.  However, the new Danny is a shadow of his former self, and she realizes it was a mistake.  To complicate matters, Gabriel, a new student with powers of his own, uncovers her secret.  As she struggles with the problems Danny is creating, she is falling for Gabriel. This novel is an unusal take on first love and letting go.

Another paranormal author, Laini Taylor, was also in Colorado recently, introducing her critically acclaimed new novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone. The first book in a series introduces Karou, a teenage girl who has been raised by Brimstone, the leader of the chimera. This wishmonger sends her through portals to collect human and animal teeth which he then uses to reanimate dead chimera. The chimera are at war with the seraphim.  When the portals suddenly disappear behind smoldering black seraphim handprints, Karou is cut off from the only family she has ever known.  Then she falls for Akiva, a seraphim warrior, and she begins to learn the back story of the thousand year old conflict, which sets up the second novel in the series.