3.5 stars. Sita is back, with the newly-created vampire Joel, the FBI agent who was hunting down the serial killer in the previous book. This one opens immediately at the end of the last one, with Sita and Joel needing to escape a very tightly wound dragnet that has closed around them. Joel tries to speak to his colleagues, but he is immediately taken into custody, and Sita has to escape on her own. The first chapter is forty pages long and extremely action packed, so be prepared!

Joel is taken to an underground bunker to be studied, and Sita is trying to figure out how to rescue him. Once she gets in, she realizes that she has been betrayed by a person from her past, and it becomes a struggle of wills as to who will escape - and survive.

I enjoyed this a lot more than book #2, perhaps because it adds to the mythos surrounding Sita and her five thousand year life. Here, Sita recalls a time in medieval Italy when she met a young priest aspiring to recreate the blood of Jesus via alchemy. She fell in love with him (Arturo) and allowed him to experiment with her blood, until things went pear-shaped. She thought she'd disposed of Arturo via the Inquisition, but unfortunately she didn't. I liked the addition of the Catholic mythology to the Hindu-inspired spirituality of Sita, and the alchemy twist was pretty ingenious. It didn't hold up quite as well in present day, but it was an interesting path nonetheless. There is a deux es machina ending to allow Sita to escape, which is also more WTF than sensible, but hey! At least the explanation is somewhat plausible: it seems that final infusion of Yaksha's blood from the last book has given Sita a lot of new powers.

Arturo knows one of Sita's weak points: the loss of her child. In exchange for her blood, he offers her the chance to become a mother again, which is something she finds very tempting. At the end of this book, she tries again to transform herself into a mortal being. Was she successful? We'll find out in Book #4!

One final note: time is flying by at warp speed; apparently only two months have elapsed since the start of Book #1. Maybe it seems longer to me because we're reading only one book a year? IDK; I find as I get older, I've lost all sense of time passing. ( )

Even though all these books end with To Be Continued... the plots of each are episodic. This one was a fun, action movie-like romp. It was ridiculous and I loved it, but I also love dumb action movies. I'm not sick of this series yet and am going to plunge ahead with book four next. ( )

Really liked it, review coming! ( )

This particular book is enticing, not only because it takes place partially in Nevada, but because Pike mixes the current story line with one from Sita's past...and they are more connected than she hoped. ( )

This particular book is enticing, not only because it takes place partially in Nevada, but because Pike mixes the current story line with one from Sita's past...and they are more connected than she hoped. ( )