I’d pre-ordered ‘Magic Claims’ so it was waiting for me in my Kindle library when I woke up yesterday. I read the first chapter before breakfast and I immediately knew that I’d be spending the rest of the day reading it. How does Ilona Andrews pull me in like that every time?

One of the joys of being retired was that I was able to spend the whole day in my sunny garden reading all 240 pages of a much-anticipated book on the day that it was published. I had a great time and finished the book with a smile on my face.

In the last book, ‘Magic Tides‘, Kate, Curran and their eight-year-old-but-already-scary son, Conlan, moved from Atlanta to Wilmington, leaving the Pack and much of their complicated history behind. It was clear from ‘Magic Tides’ that the move had re-energised the series, freeing Kate and Curren from earlier conflicts and opening up new opportunities. ‘Magic Claims’ kept that fresh, new-things-are-possible feel and ramped up the energy and builds on it.

In this book, Kate and Curran accept that not only are they unlikely to be allowed to live low-profile lives but that they don’t want to. They let themselves get pulled into protecting an isolated town against an unknown but powerful evil because Kate can’t walk away when she can stop innocent people from dying and Curran can’t resist the offer of a new, large, easily defensible territory. Then, when they are in the fight, up to their elbows in gore and struggling to defeat foes of frightening strength, they both realise that they are having a great time. This is the kind of killing that they were born to do and pretending otherwise is pointless.

I cheered at this point. One of the things that had always frustrated me about the Kate Daniels series was that there always seemed to be a reason why Kate had to hide who she was and hold back from using the power available to her. Some of the reasons for this were good reasons but I always wanted to see who Kate could be if she used everything she has. ‘Magic Claims’ took me a step closer to that and left me with some strong hints that there was more to come.

The plot of ‘Magic Claims’ is fairly straightforward but it doesn’t suffer for that. Instead, it allows more focus on the action. As always, the fight scenes in the book are wonderfully well done. This time we got to see some of the action from Curran’s point of view as well as Kate’s and I think that helped to round out the story and the character development.

I liked the length of ‘Magic Claims’. At 240 pages, it’s more than a novella but it’s 100 or so pages shorter than many of the earlier novels. To me, it seemed that this length allowed a story to be told that was complete and self-contained but which also moved the story arc for the series one step forward.

I had a lot of fun with ‘Magic Tides’ and I’ll be back for the next episode of ‘Kate Daniels: The Wilmington Years’ as soon as it’s available.