Natasha Rhodes (1) (1978–)

Kayla Steele is your average girl; she works at a cosmetics counter in a big chain-store, has a small apartment and a boyfriend who doesn't always keep his appointements. Normal, right?

Wrong. When Karrel Dante misses the most important dinner (the "proposal dinner", of course) of his girlfriends life, Kayla's life changes completely. Suddenly there are people after her... people who grow fur, have sharp teeth and just won't stay dead. It seems her boyfriend Dante was more than he let on...

Well... the story was okay, I guess, but there were way too many characters and a lot of POVs. Not to mention the end was pretty confusing with all the backstabbing done by the assorted villains in the numerous cast.
The supposedly main character didn't have that much air time and I thought that she didn't really grow much in 400 pages. Why? Because many of these pages were filled with scenes of other characters (sometimes pointless scenes). Bad guy A is doing this; Bad guy B is doing that; at the same time, Hero B is doing such stuff. Villain 123 is getting high in a corner and/or comitting random acts of violence.

With so many POV switches I couldn't really connect with any character in particular. I even question why this is a "Kayla Steele" novel instead of a "Ninette" novel or a "Harlem the werewolf" novel. It's great that we have input from other characters, but I think that if you have a main character you should stick to her. Mostly.

Still it had a good premise, if not entirely original. Also the writing style was okay.… (meer)

Dead Reckoning takes the excellent Final Destination movie formula and brings it to the literary world. A group of people escape death; one of them foreseeing the carnage that will kill them - and ultimately Fate does it's best to catch up with them. The style of anticipation of their impending deaths has been well replicated from the films. Where death seems to loom from an obvious angle, Fate doesn't always always play that card, frequently catching up with the doomed character in a surprising fashion. That makes for interesting reading. However, although the nature of the story will keep you reading, the book itself is rather simplistic. Some of the scenes are well crafted, although at times a more descriptive approach would have added to the sense of horror. Overall, Dead Reckoning is entertaining enough and readers need no prior knowledge of the series.… (meer)