Review: Betrayals by Lili St. Crow

Title: Betrayals Author: Lili St. Crow Series: Strange Angels Series Publisher: Razorbill Published: November 17, 2009 Format: Paperback ($12.50 CDN) Age Group:  Young Adult Copy: Provided by Razorbill

Synopsis:

She's no angel...
Poor Dru Anderson. Her parents are long gone, her best friend is a werewolf, and she's just learned that the blood flowing through her veins isn't entirely human. (So what else is new?)

Now Dru is stuck at a secret New England Schola for other teens like her, and there's a big problem—she's the only girl in the place. A school full of cute boys wouldn't be so bad, but Dru's killer instinct says that one of them wants her dead. And with all eyes on her, discovering a traitor within the Order could mean a lot more than social suicide...

Can Dru survive long enough to find out who has betrayed her trust—and maybe even her heart?

My Review:

This series just keeps getting better with each book I read.  I am now part way into Jealousy, the third book in the series and I have the same feeling I did reading the Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead.  With both series the first one was good but with each edition the depth of the plot grows in a direction you didn’t anticipate and the romantic intensity thickens until your tearing at the pages to see what happens next.  In Strange Angels (the first book in the series) there was a relentless onslaught of action from chapter to chapter and in Betrayals it wasn’t much different.  The action was well balanced with Dru’s growing awareness of the depth of the mystery of why her mother was killed, of who within the Order can or can not be trusted, and the growth of her interest in both Christian and Graves. 

As a writer Lili St. Crow writes the kind of descriptions that occasionally have me stop just to read the sentence over again.  She describes things in often gruesome detail but she describes each moment using all four senses, sight, smell, taste, and touch and then taps into the mystical fifth sense that so often is indescribable.  I also enjoy that although Dru is now an orphan St. Crow keeps the relationship between Dru and her father and Dru and her grandmother alive though her recollection of her fathers teachings and her grandmothers mystical owl.

My Rating: 4/5