Skinwalker: A Jane Yellowrock Novel by Faith Hunter

Skinwalker is the first book in a new series by Faith Hunter. I am a little conflicted about this novel. The writer did a good job, yet I found myself a little bored or perhaps I don't like the main character all that well or something. By the middle of the book, I had decided to not pursue the rest of the series. But by the end the book had grown on me enough that I will probably go ahead and read the second novel to see how it goes.

This plot has some familiar elements. You have a strong female character that is a vampire hunter. You also have a world set up with vampires and such has "come out of the closet" so to speak. Although, in this world it is only Witches and Vampires that are "real" so far with only the possibility of there being other supernaturals such as werewolves and elves.

What is unusual in this novel is the main character herself. She is a Cherokee Skinwalker which means she can turn into different animals, from a mountain lion that lives within her she calls beast to other animals such as birds. As long as she has some of the DNA of the organism she can turn into it. What makes her different than a werewolf is that she is not compelled to turn into another organism, but she can. This makes her like Mercedes from the Patricia Briggs novels. She also has lost her memory. She doesn't know how old she is or what happened to her family. She spent a rather long time as a Bobcat and then as a Mountain Lion so that she does not remember her true age, she only remembers being put in a foster home after she emerged from being a the Mountain Lion. She also doesn't know exactly what she is or if there are others like her. Her skinwalker abilities loan her the smell and quickness of the animals she changes into which give her an edge on vampire hunting which is why she is so good at it.

Jane Yellowrock is a vampire hunter. She is good at her job. She knows how to track rogue vampires and kill them. She is good at hiding weapons and getting the information she needs to do the job. She travels light, carrying only what she can on her bike, Bitsa. She gets hired by the vampires in New Orleans to hunt a particularly bad rogue vampire. He killed quite a few police officers and civilians before Jane was called in. Which makes for very bad press for the more civilized vampires. Jane has never met or worked with civilized vampires before; this will be a chance for her to confirm some of her vampire lore information, but this will also be a chance for the vampires to discover that she is not human. Can she find and kill the rogue before he kills more innocents or before her secret gets out? You will have to read the novel to find out.

The plot itself is fairly simple. Find and kill rogue vampire. But for reasons explained in the book, he is particularly hard to find and kill. The rest of the book is interactions between Jane and the other characters. Some of its deals with vampire politics, some of it deals with vampire lore, some of it deals with Jane's past. So you are given a lot of information in this novel so it's basically a set up novel for the rest of the series. All this information has a tendency to slow the pacing of the book down. There is some action but maybe not enough for all the information presented. I think maybe the author should have saved some of the info for the next book.

Then there are the characters. I am a character reader, if I don't like at least one character in the book, then it doesn't matter how well written the book is, I am not going to like it. For half of the book I couldn't decide if I liked Jane or not. She started to grow on me after a while and so I am going to give the second book a shot. But unfortunately, there aren't a lot of periphery characters that are in the plot enough for us to get to know them, and no one is intriguing. I don't really wonder about the past of anyone who was presented to us. They just didn't seem that interesting to me.

As far as the writing goes the pacing is slow, there is too much information, and not enough action or character development. It didn't draw me in.

A plus for this novel is that it does give a nice description of New Orleans. The author does give us a nice feel of the city with some great descriptions and scenes.

Overall, I didn't really get drawn in by this book; it didn't really catch my attention. It's a good idea but I think there are better novels out there to read. If you enjoy the supernatural genre and are waiting for the next Patricia Briggs or Kim Harrison novel then pick this one up at the library or from paperbackswap but don't spend any money on it--it's not that good.