Angels’ Blood (Guild Hunter #1)- Nalini Singh
Hachette Livre Gollancz, 2010
340 pages
RRP: AU$22.95
ISBN: 978-057-509572-4

Reviewed by Liz Grzyb

Angels’ Blood is the first in the Guild Hunter series by Nalini Singh. She already has quite a following for her sexy paranormal Psy-Changeling series (the first title in that series, Slave to Sensation is also reviewed on Ticon4.com) and by the looks of it, Guild Hunter will be snapping at its heels. The Guild Hunter in question here is Elena Devereaux, a vampire tracker and bounty hunter whose new job doesn’t just involve vampires. She is now working for the drop-dead gorgeous Archangel Raphael, ruthless and terrifyingly inhuman, yet caring and overwhelmingly attractive. Working with angels isn’t like you’d imagine — in this world they are immensely powerful and beautiful, yet they are also the Makers of vampires. This first instalment of the series is packed with drama, intrigue and attraction, and provides a nice balance between the action and the… er… action.

Elena is a pretty standard paranormal heroine in some ways. She is feisty and proud, attractive and sensual. However, she does have her own demons to fight, memories of her mother and younger sisters being killed by a vampire. Along with her highly developed olfactory senses, this really gives her no choice but to work towards tracking down and neutralising rogue vamps who have escaped from their angelic masters. She has always managed to keep her work very much apart from her private life, unlike many Hunters, but Raphael crashes through all her walls, metaphoric and literal!

Raphael, on the other hand, begins as a remote and powerful figure, but as he is changed by his association with Elena he becomes more human. One aspect of the angelic world I was unsure about was the “Quiet”, seemingly a state where Raphael willingly switched off all emotion. It made a useful plot device to put Raphael in a position where he might harm Elena, but it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of his character. Perhaps it will be explained more in the second book of the series, Archangel’s Kiss?

Gollancz has recently started providing a key to their recent paranormal releases, and I was amused to see that this novel was given a big tick for “romance” and “sexy”, and a small tick for “gothic”, “action packed” and “funny”. While the story is definitely a sexy romance, providing a lot of tension between the main characters, it doesn’t really push the boundaries. I found it more a romantic action story with some sensually charged episodes to help spice things up. I don’t know about “gothic”, either, as Angels’ Blood has very few elements of the genre except for various vampires!

I was pleasantly surprised by Singh’s down-to-earth writing style and am looking forward to the next book in the series, Archangel’s Kiss. Those who prefer their paranormal cut with crime will certainly enjoy this novel.