I haven’t read any of the Chicagoland Vampire series, so I went into the spinoff series with zero world knowledge. The lack of knowledge wasn’t a problem because, boy howdy, is there some infodumpage in the first few chapters. I had to coax myself to keep going on to the next chapter because the setup and construction of the world in the first part was some slow reading. But once the main character moved from Paris to Chicago, the story got going, and it got a lot more awesome.

Elisa Sullivan is the only vampire child born to vampire parents, and her folks are the heroes of prior books in the Chicagoland Vampires series. A lot of prior characters show up in this book, partly to connect them to the new cast, but as I had no idea who they were, I didn’t pay too much attention. (It must be a challenge to start a new series and both attract new readers and welcome existing readers of the first series, and I can understand why the balance sometimes tipped toward prior characters). Elisa has been working for a vampire House in France for several years and returns to Chicago to her parents House for international supernatural peace talks, which goes about as well as you might imagine.

Part of the story is Elisa re-entering her “old” life, now as an adult with fighting skills and a very intricate and nuanced fluency in the multiple political worlds she inhabits simultaneously. Her parents are thrilled to see her, but they struggle like any parent with recognizing their daughter is an adult and is going to do things they don’t like. Elisa is also carrying a secret, that she’s not just a vampire, and she hasn’t told her parents about that at all, knowing it would upset and worry them.

Connor Keene was Elisa’s childhood nemesis, as their parents were friends and they were thrown together a lot. He’s now the heir to his shifter pack, though his position as Alpha is not guaranteed, as others in the pack may challenge him for it. He has plenty of diplomacy and maneuvering to worry about in his own family, let alone with all the other supernatural folks showing up in Chicago. He is also the only other individual who knows about Elise’s secret. When the first evening of the peace talks ends with one of the delegates being killed and a shifter from Connor’s pack is blamed, Elise and the city Ombudsman’s office (like a liaison between the mayor and the supernatural folks) have to work together to figure out who really did the killing part and why.

So there’s the world set up, which is pretty cumbersome, and then there’s the immediate mystery, which represents a piece of the larger diplomatic power balance between supernatural groups. And then there are the individual characters, including Elisa, Connor, Theo, Lulu, Riley, and others, and they were the real charm of this story for me. Once Elisa started talking to other people instead of ruminating or summarizing the story (the book is in first person) I enjoyed it tremendously.

Elisa is very funny, and there are points where her narration made me laugh out loud. I liked that part of the setup for this book is Elisa re-entering her childhood world as an adult, because that comes with all sorts of personal diplomacy requirements.

She has a good relationship with her parents, and with most of the adults who inhabit the world. She’s not resentful and angry at the generation that came before her, but she is trying to figure out how she fits within it, what her role and job might be when her existence creates a lot of expectations and attention. Her conversations with her parents included awareness of who they are and how important they are to the world they inhabit, but also how much they love each other. Here is Elisa talking with her father in a scene that I found adorable:

He rose, came over, and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “My smart and kind and beautiful girl.”

He liked to say that, had been saying it for years, and had always put “beautiful” last. Whether it was true or not, he’d tell me it was the least important of the three. “You are smart,” he’d say. “You should be kind. And if you are, you’ll always be beautiful.”

She’s trying to figure out her life within the system of rules they set up, and while the adults who raised her cast a very long shadow, she also has room to decide for herself how she’ll work within the opportunities she has.

She also has a solid core of friends, both new and longstanding, and seeing her build a home for herself among friends was lovely. Her best friend, Lulu, is the daughter of magical people who herself tries to avoid and reject all magic, focusing her energy and talent into art instead. She invites Elisa to live with her, and their roommate conversations are so much fun. The group of them talk in ways that people in their 20s would talk, and worry about things that people that age would be concerned about, plus they have all the supernatural stuff to worry about, too. Lulu is wonderful, and I presume she’ll be the heroine of a future book, which should be very entertaining:

“I just want to make art and drink good wine and binge unhealthy television. Is that so wrong?”

I smiled at her. “That’s the cool thing about being a grown-up. You get to set your own boundaries.”

“A novel idea,” she murmured, and I guessed she was thinking about our parents.

They try to look out for one another and figure out their own lives in a very complicated and dangerous world, and they – to my everlasting delight – talk to one another about priorities and problems instead of presuming and fuming about them. Lulu and Elisa, especially, build on their existing childhood friendship to create a new space for one another as adults:

“And finally, we get to have some normal…. Breakfast. Conversations. Food we cook ourselves. Trips to the zoo. Self-damn-care. Stuff that’s completely mundane…. I think we’re entitled to some normal. And I think that’s maybe the kind of thing I can help with.”

They’re all emotionally mature and intelligent people in a seriously complicated world, and I really liked them.

Because this is the first of a series, not all the major plot threads are resolved, which I expected would be the case. With the mystery of who killed whom for what and why, the specific showdown and power re-balance happened mostly off the page, which was a bit of a let down.

I did like the attraction and development between Connor and Elisa, a pairing that’s both very electric from the first conversation they have and equipped with a giant pile of obstacles to their being together. Some things are settled at the end of this book, but a lot is unsettled between them, too. I also liked that, appropriately, the world of Chicago and the world of supernaturals is casually inclusive and diverse. Those who want peace and coexistence and are willing to work toward that goal find each other pretty quickly and seeing them coalesce into a functional and powerful group was very cool.

Most of all, I liked that this is a new world with a new set of characters that felt both familiar and very fresh. They’re struggling with figuring out how to be in their world, and, especially for Elisa, accepting themselves for who they are, and what they are as well. That part resonated with me, as did Elisa’s parents worrying whether they’d done a good job raising her when she’s the only born vampire on the planet (no pressure there or anything).

Once the story got going and Elisa started talking to people instead of ruminating for the reader, this book was a delight. I had a great time reading it: I highlighted a bunch of pieces of conversations that, as I was writing this review, I went back and re-read with a big, goofy smile. I’m terrible – really terrible – about keeping up with series, but this one I’m going to try to follow. Hanging out with the heirs of Chicagoland was way too much fun, and I definitely want more.