Review – Once Bitten, Twice Shy by Jennifer Rardin (5/5 stars)

This is the first book of the Jaz Parks series by Jennifer Rardin. So far there are 8 books planned for this series. The fifth one comes out Jan ’09 and is called “One More Bite”. This was a great book.

Describing this book as James Bond meets the supernatural community is definitely accurate. Jaz Parks works for the CIA. 6 months after she starts reporting to her new boss; the group’s top assassin, Vayl, requests that Jaz join him as an assistant. What Jaz and Vayl thinks is a typical, kidnap and question the terrorist, kind of gig gets complicated when they find out that the terrorist in question belongs to an underground organization that is aligning itself with the underbelly of the supernatural community in order to unleash a virus deadly to vampire-kind.

Jaz is an amazing character. She is tough, by uses common sense and recognizes her bounds. She accepts the changes in her life and tends not to whine and agonize over them. She is a get-it-done kind of girl, who loves her gadgets, and her hot cars. There is a lot Jaz has to discover about herself; as a Sensitive she doesn’t quite know the bounds of her power. She is working on it though and makes leaps and bounds in discovering what she can do in this book.

Vayl is also awesome. He is tough and has some crazy cool vampiric abilities (he is a wraith for goodness sack!); yet he does make mistakes, and he does have that vulnerable side that a good male character needs. We find out some of Vayl’s past in this book, but there is a lot more there to uncover.

The writing is very solid. I like the writing style a lot. It is fast-paced, full of awesome action scenes, and cool ideas. The gadgets that Jaz gets to work with are really neat, her gun Grief, is lots of deadly fun, and I just couldn’t put this book down.

I bought books 2-4 used before I had read book 1. Now I am glad that I did. I am excited to read the next couple books. So far I think this is going to be an incredible series. I wanted to give it more like 4.5 stars because I think the second book will tell if this is an outstanding series or just another good series in the long line of good paranormal series that are out there.

In summary, I love Jaz, I love Vayl, I love the writing and I am so excited to read more of it! There wasn’t a single thing about this book that I didn’t love.