Jealousy (Strange Angels #3) by Lili St. Crow

Released: August 3, 2010
Format: Trade Paperback
Pages: 316
Publisher: Razorbill
ISBN-13: 978-1-59514-290-0

It’s a good thing Dru Anderson is fast. Because the sucker chasing her isn’t slowing down-and he won’t rest until he has tasted her blood and silenced her heart . . .

Dru’s best friend, Graves, and her strange and handsome savior, Christophe, are ready to help her take on the ultimate evil. But will their battle for Dru’s heart get in the way of her survival?

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I am obsessed with Dru Anderson. Strange Angels is one of the best series I’ve read recently. My love of these books is on par — or at least pretty darn close — to my adoration of Ilona Andrews‘ Kate Daniels series or Patricia Briggs‘ Mercy Thompson books. As Rachel Zoe would say, mah-jor! (Maybe that’s just 2010 Rachel Zoe. I’ll have to wait for the next season of the The Rachel Zoe Project to find out what her word of the year is for 2011, since it isn’t clear from her newsletters. Yeah, I’m kind of obsessed.)

Strange Angels isn’t my first time reading Lilith Saintcrow/Lili St. Crow. Long before this blog, I devoured her Dante Valentine series but I stopped reading her after the first Jill Kismet novel because I felt like it was retreading a lot of the ground that she’d covered in her Dante Valentine books, but I just couldn’t resist borrowing Strange Angels and Betrayals from the library the other day. And then I had to get my hands on Jealousy because the first two books were so good! So good, in fact, that I didn’t even want to take the time to blog about them because that was time when I could have been reading more of Dru’s adventures. The only reason I’ve stopped? The fourth book, Defiance, isn’t available yet, at least not through my friendly neighbourhood library, which is where I have to get it from in an effort to be more fiscally minded.

All of these ramblings aside, I have to gush about Jealousy now. Some of what I have to say applies to the series as a whole (at least so far) but I’m going to try to keep it to Jealousy when I can.

First off, Dru is a fantastic heroine. She’s tough, smart, and spunky but also vulnerable and unsure because of the situation she finds herself in — vampires wanting her dead, a conspiracy in the Order to take her out, her own uncertainty about Christophe’s intentions, the changing relationship between her and Graves, the broken werewolf, Ash, that she’s taken on as her own personal cause, what it means to be svetocha (sp? I don’t have the book beside me as I write this)…Really, this list goes on and on.

It’s short and sweet, and it doesn’t really talk too much about Anna, the only other svetocha alive in many years, at least since the Dru’s mother’s death. But more on her later.

One of the things that I like about the Strange Angels series is the romantic triangle that Dru finds herself in. It’s easy to root for either Graves or Christophe and I find myself wavering between the two, though I think Graves has my heart right now. The supporting characters are all well developed and clearly individual, and I want to know more about pretty much all of them. The one character who’s not as multidimensional, unfortunately, is Anna, the only other svetocha who, incidentally, wants Dru dead. She comes off a something of a mustache twirler – evil for the sake of being evil, if you know what I mean. But this is a small quibble and I hope that we’ll learn more about Anna in the next book.