Life as Aileen knew it ended when she woke up in a morgue sporting a new set of fangs after a wild night out. Now, as a courier for the supernatural world, she balances figuring out this whole vampire thing with making enough to support her ice cream habit.
When a job goes disastrously awry and ends with a body on the ground, Aileen finds herself in over her head as she draws the attention of a powerful creature intent on her death.
Aileen will need to separate her allies from her enemies before it’s too late. To survive, she’ll work with a being she swore to avoid at all costs – a powerful vampire who may hold the key to her survival. Or the flame from which her world burns.

IN A NUTSHELL
A good start to a seven-book (so far) Urban Fantasy series set in Columbus Ohio and featuring ex-army, turned-into-a-vampire-against-her-will milennial, Aileen Travers. Watching the sometimes a little whiney, sometimes incredibly brave, Aileen struggle to stay independent in the supernatural world she’s stumbled into, where everyone seems to want a piece of her was good fun. The book felt fresh. The tone was light. The action was fast-paced and the supernatural world had enough twists to hook my curiosity.

‘Shadow’s Messenger’ (2016) is the first book in a seven-book series by T. A. White, featuring twenty-eight-year-old Aileen Travers who was turned into a vampire against her will two years ago when she returned from Afghanistan. Now she’s trying to make a life for herself in the supernatural world that goes unseen by most of the people living in Columbus, Ohio. She works as a messenger for a courier service that deals exclusively with supernaturals, while trying to stay off the radar of the vampires (who would try to force her to join a clan and serve a century-long apprenticeship) and hiding her fanged state from her family.

T. A. White dropped Aileen into the middle of a mystery that had her out of her depth, more or less constantly under threat and forced her to work closely with vampires, witches, werewolves, and sorcerers, none of whom trusted each other and all of whom tried to take advantage of Aileen’s ignorance of how the supernatural world works. To find a way to survive and remain free. Aileen has to discover who or what has been killing supernaturals of all kinds and find a way to stop the violence.

There was lots of intense action, engaging world-building, and a decent mystery but what I liked best was how Aileen dealt with the powerful people she kept being kidnapped by or attacked by or threatened by. She was marvellously unimpressed by patriarchal structures. She used humour to undermine the self-importance of her would-be overlords and she used her wits to figure out what was going on and how she could survive it.

At the start of the book, it seemed to me that Aileen’s personality flickered a little, with the I’m-a-milenial-why-should-I-care? button being hit a little too hard, but, by the second half of the book, her character behaved more consistently. I’m curious to see wht she’ll do next.