Book Tour Review-The Hunted by Kristy Berridge

Title: The Hunted

 Author: Kristy Berridge

Series:  The Hunted #1

Published:  April 2011

Length: 582 pages

Warnings: profanity, drinking, sexual innuendo 14+

Source: Author for blog tour

Summary : Elena Manory is by no means an ordinary teenage girl. Being born with the ability to heal herself from any injury, and with the knowledge that on her eighteenth birthday she will become a Vampire, Elena is aware that she is more than a little different from other girls her age.
It isn’t until she meets William Granville, an alluring and impossibly handsome vampire, that she begins to question her destiny and what secrets the Institute of Magical Intervention and her adopted family have withheld—secrets that could change the fates of not only her own life, but of the lives of all the immortals.
As events spiral out of control, William may be the only person Elena can place her trust in. He, and Elena’s magical family, must fight to save her, joining forces to defeat a common, deadly foe. For William, it is his chance to save the girl that he has searched eternity to find.

Review: It’s (relatively) not often that you see vampire girls. It’s often the boys, and then the girl gets turned if she’s lucky. It’s quite nice seeing the girl born a vampire for once. Elena knows that she will become a vampire some day, but she doesn’t know everything else about herself. Which is quite a lot, and quite major to how she’ll turn out. She’s living with a family of Protectors-kind of like slayers, but magical versions. Then she meets William Granville, a vampire, and a lot of things happen. She gets pulled into a Vanator hunt (a Vanator is essentially a werewolf that drinks blood. And the a’s should have hats on them. Whatever they’re called in punctuation terms.), she learns the truth about her parentage, she learns she’s even further than normal than she thought she was, and she finds herself falling in love with a 400+ year old vampire. Yay!

So, it starts really quickly with Will out hunting Vanators. We soon get to the main bit-Elena’s life. To be honest, the first bit wasn’t amazing. The first third (about that much, well, until she meets Will) is nice to read, but lacking on the paranormal side, and edging towards teen girl-y problems-sneaking out for parties and such. Not really what I was expecting, and really not my thing. I suppose it was useful for character building, especially around Elena’s family.

Then we met Will and it all picked up. Hunts are fairly frequent in this, and there’s quite a bit of blood and guts at various points in the story.

Elena, once we’d got over the first part, is really really cool. Her parentage is just one of the many things that gives her an edge-her general attitude and her development are two others. I love the way she speaks-always speaking her mind and consistently sassy and strong. She definitely develops-how could she not after learning all of THAT about herself?  Will, I quite liked. Even if it was creepy how he always turned up.

There’s some very realistic seeming dialogue, especially in the family scenes. I can guess that everything that happened between Elena and her “mother” would have happened anyway, even if they weren’t a vampire and a magical protector. And the bits with Lucas, the brother. Aww. Lucas is a very sweet, if sometimes annoyingly, protective brother that makes having siblings not seem so bad.

The best thing about this book is the description in the action scenes. Well, the description throughout. But in the action scenes especially. Paranormal Australia is easily imagined, and I felt like I was right there in all of it.

Overall:  Strength 4 tea to a great start to a paranormal series that I definitely want to carry on with.

Links: Amazon| Goodreads | Author website |