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Kitty Takes A Holiday

Carrie Vaughn

Published 2007          303 pages

Synopsis

After being outed as a werewolf on national television, radio talk show DJ Kitty Norville is taking some time out from her radio show.  Holed up in a remote mountain cabin, Kitty is supposed to be using the time to write a book about her life as a werewolf but in reality she is just hiding from the world.

All Kitty has ever wanted is a quiet life but her peace is shattered when someone starts mutilating small animals and leaving the bodies on her front porch.  The local sheriff seems disinclined to investigate but it is clear to Kitty that someone local doesn’t a werewolf living in their community and is trying to drive her away.

When Cormac (a werewolf hunter and Kitty’s unlikely friend) shows up at her door with his badly injured cousin Ben, Kitty can kiss her life of solitude goodbye.  Ben is Kitty’s lawyer but now after being savaged by a werewolf it is left to Kitty to teach him how to cope with his lycanthropy.

When the animal mutilations escalate from small animals to herds of cattle savagely ripped apart in their fields Kitty falls under even more suspicion from the Sheriff.  Kitty knows a werewolf is not responsible for the dead animals but can she prove it before any humans get hurt?

The Review

Kitty Takes A Holiday is the third book in Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty series.  Although the Kitty books focus on Kitty and her life as a werewolf, these books fall into the Urban Fantasy genre so vampires are never usually too far away. 

In Kitty Takes A Holiday the vampires only get the briefest mention.  In fact the vampire content of this book is so small that it barely makes the criteria for a LoveVampires review but after reviewing the rest of the series it seemed a shame to miss this one out on a technicality.  Especially as, lack of vampires withstanding, this is the best Kitty book written so far.

The strength of Carrie Vaughn’s writing is in the realistic human characters and situations that she creates while writing fantasy genre fiction.  Kitty might be a werewolf but this doesn’t make her a brave gung-ho kick-ass woman.  Her character is more realistic than that.  She is sensibly scared when confronted by aggressive people or scary monsters and yet bravely stands by her beliefs and friends rather than going for an easy path.  The situations that Kitty and her friends get into are sorted out in realistic fashion.  No one waves a magic wand and makes everything okay - even though she lives in a world where magic is real.

Kitty Takes A Holiday concentrates on werewolves and monsters of the human variety - humans who have chosen to use magic to do monstrous deeds.  Effectively showing that being a supernatural monster doesn’t actually make people do evil things, being evil makes people do evil things.   

Kitty Takes A Holiday has a fast paced, exciting plot with plenty of mystery, romance, action and supernatural thrills guaranteed to keep the pages turning late into the night although it is the engaging characters that make the Kitty books really stand out from crowd.

If you love vampires I have to say there aren’t really any in this book, but don’t let this put you off – this book is great without them! 

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