Midnight Blue-Light Special: An Incryptid Novel by Seanan McGuire Edition: Mass Market Paperback Price: $7.99
4 Stars But With a Slight Reservation, March 13, 2013 This review is from: Midnight Blue-Light Special: An Incryptid Novel (Mass Market Paperback) For anyone interested in this book, make sure you have read the first one so you will understand what is going on in this one. Ms. Mcquire does a great job of giving you some background, but it may not be enough to make you appreciate this book. Well a year has passed since we first met our heroine Verity Price. She is a cryptozoologist (yeah I had to look this word up too!) and budding competitive ballroom dancer. She is helping her family fight the good fight against the Covenent, who is looking to wipe the traitorous Price family as well as the cryptid's, off the face of the earth. Why? Well, because long ago the Price's were also members of the Covenet. This is a group of zealots who are looking to rid the world of cryptids, or "things that go bump in the night/monsters" as more commonly known!. But, the Prices long ago lost their belief that the world HAD to be rid of the cryptids and defected. So now, this story begins with Dominic, who is a member of the Covenent but is also in love with Verity, letting Verity know that agents from the Covenent are on their way to New York and something must be done to help the cryptid's of the city. Now mind you, Verity loves Dominic, but can she really trust him? After all, he may be helping her but he hasn't broken away from the Covenent. The conflict between these two is really one of the most emotional aspects of this book and the most interesting thing to watch play out. The character building has been an amazing thing to watch and the world building did not take center stage in this novel as it did in the last one. It was not necessary to keep building the world just yet, since this was going to be a much more personal book. What I noticed and I don't think that many other readers are going to see, is that Ms McGuire has a tendency to repeat herself...a lot. For a while it almost felt as if she was trying to fulfill her word count with all the repeated passages and hyperbole. However, in the end you seem to be able glide right over that and just let the adventure capture you. This caused me to not be as effusive as I was with the first Novel in this series. Ms McGuire did something interesting with this novel. The story is told from Verity's POV, but for a few chapters, one of the cryptid's, tells the story so it is seen through Sarah's eyes.. Sarah is a telepathic Cuckoo who happens to be Verity's `cousin'. This was quite clever and because of what was going on at the time, kept the story from getting stale and repetitive.