Angels Blood

Angels Blood is the first book in the Guild Hunter series by Nalini Singh.  It follows the story of Elena Devereux who is a natural born hunter who works for the Guild.  She is able to track vampires by their scent alone.  In the world that Ms Singh has created Archangels rule and make vampires, once a vampire has been made it must stay working for the Angel for 100 years and if it tries to escape it is Elena’s job to track it and bring it back to the Angel.  Elena is summoned to a meeting with the Archangel Raphael who requires her to hunt another Archangel that has gone rogue and is on a bloody rampage around New York.  Elena does not want to take on the mission as she sees it as a no win situation but Raphael will not take no as an answer going as far as to threaten the life of her friends. 

I found this book to be a mix between Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance and because of that there were parts (UF) that I liked and parts (PNR) that I didn’t like.  I sort of liked Elena.  She is supposed to be a kick ass hunter and some of the time she is but when she is with Raphael she turns a bit mushy and I just wanted to grab her and give her a shake.  I understand that Raphael is meant to be an almighty powerful angel who views humans as toys with a miniscule lifespans but I wanted Elena to be stronger around Raphael than she was.  I thought the story had a slow start in getting to the action and actual hunting of the rogue Archangel but once it did it was action packed.  I did like Raphael and it was interesting to see how he changed from something so alien into something with human feelings.  There were two other characters that really stood out for me one was the blue winged angel Illium (who deserves his own book in my opinion) and the other was the vampire Dmitri who is head of Raphael’s security.  Apart from the romantic mushy parts I really liked this book and I will continue with the series.  I would like to give it 4 fangs.