Spider's Bite: An Elemental Assassin Book [Mass Market Paperback]

If Urban Fantasy were a poker game, and UF authors were the players, Jennifer Estep would be the one who sat down at a high stakes game full of steely-eyed gamblers, pushed a huge pile of chips into the middle of table and said, "All in." In a genre full of gritty locales and bada** heroines, Estep found a way to up the ante.

Gin Blanco, the heroine of Spider's Bite, is an assassin. She's not a former assassin. She's not an assassin in the service of some higher cause, she has no special dispensation from angels or demons or any other supernatural group that hands out licenses to kill. She's an assassin for hire and she takes real pride in a job well done. Gin does prefer to kill people who deserve it - she does a fair amount of "pro bono" work, as she calls it - but this is one book that doesn't gloss over the fact that even her charitable activities leave bodies on the floor, wives without husbands, children without fathers.

The plot is fast-paced, a real page-turner. As the book opens, Gin is just finishing one job and, once the deed is done, she's immediately sent on another. She prefers a little more prep time, but the contract is worth $5 million and the job doesn't sound too hard: all she has to do is kill a middle aged accountant within a certain time frame. For an assassin of Gin's caliber, nothing could be easier. But just as she's about to pull the trigger, Gin discovers she's been double-crossed: the client who took out the contract on the accountant took out another on Gin herself. The plan was for Gin's death to tie up any loose ends related to the accountant's murder and keep suspicion away from the client. But things don't go as planned. Gin kills the assassin hired to kill her rather than the other way around, and then she goes looking for revenge.

Gin isn't squeamish about killing, but she does have a softer side and she's utterly dedicated to the few people in the world who she really cares about. Saying she'd protect them with her life is putting it mildly. I found Gin surprisingly likable. She's so confident, so at ease with herself, and she throws herself into whatever she does 110%. I was really convinced by her personality, by the mix of deep feeling and heartless violence, and I rooted for her even as the bodies piled up.

The fantasy aspect here has a lot of supernatural species running amok in the world - dwarves, vampires, and giants - but especially elementals. Elementals have magic related to one of the four elements: fire, stone, air, and ice. In some cases, two. Gin is a Stone elemental, and the villain of Spider's Bite is an Air elemental. The magic is pretty thoroughly integrated into the story, but all of the characters behaved like humans. There didn't seem to be any kind species-centric personality traits - no werewolves with pack instinct, no vampires who can't control their bloodlust, etc. This made the magic feel a lot more mundane...which might be a good or bad thing, depending on your perspective.

Spider's Bite didn't make me jump up and down with glee, but it's probably the best series-starter I've read in a couple of months, and I'm eager to read the sequel.

Review courtesy of [...]

Gin, aka the Spider, is an elite assassin for hire. As she puts it, she's got the skills, blood doesn't bother her, and the money is good. She does have her own code of ethics that limit her services to the truly deserving (as well as a strict no pets, no kids policy). When her current client double crosses her and kills someone close to her, Gin has a clear conscience in vowing revenge, and enlists the help of the only honest cop in Ashland (a metropolis in an alternate South) who has been hunting Gin ever since she killed his partner.

I loved the thoroughness of the world building in Spider's Bite. Magic is common. Some people are gifted with magical abilities tied to various elements (Stone, Ice, Earth, and Fire) and vampires, dwarves, and giants are part of the population. And I definitely think that the urban fantasy genre was ripe for a good female assassin

It should come as no surprise that Jennifer Estep is a self proclaimed fan of the show Alias. In the opening scene of Spider's Bite, Gin is trying to escape from an insane asylum in a way that is very reminiscent of one of my favorite episodes of Alias. Gin had to be resourceful, patient and quick on her feet. And as an assassin, I liked her immediately. When she wasn't killing people? Not quite as much.

Gin is an extremely aggressive character in every sense of the word. Alpha with a capital `A.' In her professional life, that aggression is vital. She would have died long ago without it. In her personal life? It's a little hard to take.

Normally I prefer at least a little romance in my urban fantasy, but I hate to say that I think Spider's Bite would have fared better without it. That's not to say there actually is any romance in this book, there isn't. But there is a fair amount of sex. I'm all for strong women and all that, but Gin came off as very masculine in her encounters with Detective Donovan. Which in turn made Donovan look like a chick. The way she objectified him, the way her fought his lust for her because of moral reasons...we've seen it before in a hundred other books (and movies) with the roles reversed. It sounds like it would be a fun switch, but I found it off-putting. On a side note this type of switch worked amazingly well in the movie Point of No Return which incidentally also featured a female assassin. So it can work, I just don't think it did here.

What did work was the meta-narrative that was set up for the series. The history of Gin, who killed her family and why. It's clear that Jennifer Estep has an endgame in mind with this series. The next two books in the Elemental Assassin series are scheduled for release in 2010 (Web of Lies in June and Venom in October). I'll be looking forward to them, hopefully Gin will lighten up just a little with her personal life. In her professional life? She already kills.

Sexual Content: References to rape and pedophilia. Several brief but semi graphic sexual fantasies. A scene of sensuality. A sex club with vague references to people having sex in public. A brief ménage a trois. One long, graphic sex scene.

My Rating: 3 out of 5

As a teenager, Gin Blanco lost her family to a brutal attack which left her homeless, friendless, and running scared. All that changed after she met Fletcher, the kind own of a local BBQ joint. Fletcher got Gin back on her feet while wiping away her fear with the knowledge of how to protect herself and those she loves. Years later, she's become a tough assassin, known as the Spider, with a killer record. And if her sharp knives don't do the trick, Gin's ace in the hole happens to be an affinity for stone, making her a rare elemental.

After agreeing to a risky contract which ends up going south, Gin quickly finds herself fighting tooth and nail to protect those she loves while trying to stay alive herself. But the only way she's going to make it out alive in the corrupt and brutal city of Ashland is by aligning herself with by-the-book Detective Donovan Caine. Which can only complicate matters since said easy-on-the-eyes Detective happens to loathe every single aspect of Gin's chosen profession. Figures.

Jennifer Estep has created an intriguing new world in her newest series Elemental Assassins. As a dangerous and corrupt city with dirty cops ready to look the other way, Ashland reminds me of a southern Gotham City with an added bonus of powerful magic. Though equipped with an appealing world-building concept, I struggled to connect to Gin as a character. Even in the face of tragedy, I never really felt that her grief was genuine. Sad to say, her narrative often seemed forced and quite repetitive. I often found myself hearing Gin describe the same types of scenes over and over again. Her enemies were always "sloppy, sloppy, sloppy" and every description of the attractive Detective Caine ended with "Mmm." While I'll give you that a good lookin' man can be mouth watering, I don't need the blatant reminder every time he pops up. Though I did catch a glimmer of chemistry between Gin and Caine, their awkward exchanges tended to leave me surprisingly uncomfortable and a little squeamish more often than not. How unfortunate. Gin's story really had the potential for becoming a honest and hard-hitting UF series but Spider's Bite ultimately failed to deliver on the entertainment front.

On a side note, I am actually totally digging this cover. In a Urban Fantasy market awash of books that have no relation whatsoever to their story, the cover art for Spider's Bite is refreshingly accurate, and really eye-catching.

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