Can't go wrong with Ilona Andrews! robgirlbooks' Review of Gunmetal Magic!!

4 STARS!! Gunmetal Magic (Kate Daniels 5.5) by Ilona Andrews is so much fun! I could tag along with Andrea Nash all day every day. The girl is plain awesome. Andrea has had a crap life, I'm talking shapeshifter-style crap life. You know shifters never grow up skipping through daisies or humming lullabies while hanging up the laundry. To survive, Andrea chose a very human existence, but the humans she gave her blood, sweat, and tears to betrayed her and the animal inside found a foothold both in her psyche and in the real world. She can no longer hide behind her pretty face and mad skills with guns. Then throw in Raphael. Oh my goodness, not only is he amazingly hot and lethal, but Andrea loves him like she's never loved anything or anyone in her entire life. Problem is, she messes up, he messes up, and they're both total jerks about it. They threaten and fight, then they're hot for each other, then the day starts over. Throw in a big world ending type catastrophe that must be stopped and you have Gunmetal Magic. I loved this story, but I had a couple issues. One, it felt like a novella despite being over 300 pages long. Two, the timeline threw me for a loop. There's an actual novella (Magic Gifts) that takes place in the middle of this story. You can't read both at the same time and it is cool getting to see a scene from various angles, but I'm just not a fan of splitting stories this way so that one ends up stealing a little bit of the thunder from the other. I will say that the romance in Gunmetal was spot on for me. There is so much tension between Andrea and Raphael that as a reader you growl along with them. You squeal and sigh. In the end, I was exhausted and saying to myself, "It's all good." Can't go wrong with a read that does that.

If you haven't started this series and you're a fan of fantasy, urban fantasy, kick ass heroines, amazing writing, hot shifter men who need to be brought down a notch, uh, what was I saying? Right, read this series! Start with Magic Bites. Keep going. After book 5, read Gunmetal Magic and the novella Magic Gifts. Move on to book 6 and then wait with the rest of us for the next one.