Ignite the Fire: Inferno Paperback – 16 Jan. 2022

I loved this storyline. The author has a marvellous sense of the ridiculous,which enabled me to smile and appreciate her humour. I enjoyed her perspective on the fables and legends of this world. I am trying not to give away the story but I tried very hard not to reach the end of the book. The only advantage I had was I have the next adventure waiting for me when I finish this review.Well done Karen Chance, you have handled trauma for your characters in a very thoughtful manner. I sometimes feel other authors do not appreciate how off putting it can be for their readers. I appreciate the care you have taken and highly recommend this book and the other series associated with it.

Another fantastic and fast paced story with one hell of a twist...in fact one hell of a series of twists throughout! This one had me in tears several times and laughing out loud just as many. I'm also not so secretly hoping for either a novella or two or a full on book of Pritkin and Mirceas trajectories. Can't get enough of that cranky mage ❣️Wonderful once again and I can't wait for the next installment. Until then I'll be spending some quality time with Dory and Louis.

This book is a lot of what you've come to expect from Chance if you're this far into the series. She's an excellent storyteller, gives plenty of plot twists which are always on point, and characterisation is excellent as usual.The story develops massively in this book, as does Cassie. The tone is a lot darker in places, including in the big fight at the end, which is one of the best Chance has written so far overall. And the epilogue seriously badass.As people have mentioned there is explicit sexual assault in this book. It's nothing like anything Chance has written before so it did catch me off guard and made the tone of this book a lot darker than what's come before. Like others have said, the assault does seem unnecessarily drawn out and didn't really further the plot. The biggest issue with it is the way it is completely brushed off afterwards! It's not realistic at all.Besides this, I think the book just needs a lot more editing, but I understand Chance isn't with a publisher now so I can see why that side of things may have suffered. I say that because the descriptions are just too long in a lot of places, I found myself skipping paragraphs just to get to the point. Also Cassie's internal monologue of 'I can't do this' needs to be drastically cut and I think this book is too action-packed. And there's a lot of explanation towards the end of the book but it's very hard to follow and I didn't fully understand what had/was happening due to how complex it all got. These have been common pitfalls throughout this entire series though so if you're still here it's nothing new.Overall if you are a die hard fan of this series as I am you will really enjoy this book!

A heroine who feels real and very human instead of the two dimensional puppet who struts through far too many fantasy novels.Chaos and madness throughout. Pacted with action, the plot twists keep coming but every twist and turn makes sense. If you are paying attention the clues are there for you to figure out as Cassie struggles to understand and fight the enemys all around her.Ms Chance has excelled once again.

What a rush of murder, death, brutality and a really satisfying epilogue, really love this series, its fast, fun, sad, vampires. Makes and a demi goddess with some fey, old gods and demons to round out the roll call

I adored this book, the series is my favourite, but this story was a brilliant conclusion to part one Incendiary, fast paced, full of plot twists avd heartfelt. Cannot wait to see how the series concludes

Trigger warning: This review contains references to a sexual assault scene that happens in the book. It really caught me off guard, as neither the Amazon description nor the book itself included any mention of it!!! If you're sensitive to descriptions of sexual violence but still want to read the book, skip chapters ten through sixteen, and just be aware that there will be references to the assault in later chapters too ⚠️Inferno is the long-awaited second part of Ignite the Fire: Incendiary, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that it follows a similar pattern: constantly shifting through time and space in Faerie, catching up with some characters back home, a lot of fast-paced action, and the usual epic battle towards the end! Unfortunately, the book also suffers from the usual pacing issues of the series. After spending eight books progressing at a snail's pace, missing a whole chunk of time between the last few books is really jarring. Things that were made out to be such a big deal in previous books are conveniently forgotten, and characters do a full 180 and resolve their deep-rooted hangups off-screen. Between one scene and the next, Pritkin goes from literally fighting his incubus twin to merging with him, while Mircea suddenly starts viewing his centuries-old obsession to save Elena as selfish. It's great to have some character development after twelve books, but such character-defining moments deserved more than a four page conversation. There are hundreds of pages of frantic action scenes and random people's flashbacks to sift through, so it's not like Inferno couldn't have fleshed out these major once-in-a-lifetime paradigm shifts a bit more too.And I really have to mention that scene ... It's one thing to hint at sexual violence or include it as a character's backstory in a way we could expect from this series by now ... but this is essentially 34 pages of detailed sexual assault build-up. All the way through it you're frowning at the book thinking to yourself "Is this going where I think it's going? Are we actually going to go there right now?" and "Clearly someone must have been watching too much Last Night in Soho lately". Not only was it obviously very uncomfortable to read, it also went on for far too long and happened for no good reason as far as I could tell. There wasn't much of a story arc there. There were some post-traumatic flashbacks, but then after a conversation the next day we're over it and Cassie and Pritkin are having sex to fulfil the usual "at least one sex scene per book" quota. It came across as little more than needless trauma-baiting and a cheap trope to use Cassie's sexual assault to drive Pritkin's character development. I don't know what kind of headspace the author was in when she wrote the scene so I'm not trying to judge her personally, but I think this was a poorly thought-out attempt at writing a sexual assault story line and it may honestly be a new low for the series.I'm really torn, because the book is clearly full of great ideas but the overall product left a lot to be desired. There are still talking goat demigods, murderous bras, and all the fantastic things we love about the series; but there are also a few issues that cast a pall over everything. Even though Inferno would be a solid four or five stars for the most part, some of the story decisions were more than a little questionable. That awfully implemented scene is made even worse by the fact that magical limitations suddenly apply when the plot needs Cassie to be helpless, but then all rules go out of the window when it comes to always finding a secret spell or loophole to defy the laws of life and death and the way the universe works. And Faerie is apparently a quasi-sentient being with desires that can let or make things happen as a plot convenience now??? Let's be honest, anyone who has read the series this far must love the series as a whole ... but people may have a really hard time liking this book.

Love the series and waited to buy both Incendiary & Inferno together and now I'm wanting the next book(s) to find out what all the characters will be doing.