What began as the search for truth has becomes a deadly game of wills and survival.

When Olivia Taylor-Jones found out she was not actually the adopted child of a privileged Chicago family but the daughter of a notorious pair of convicted serial killers, her life exploded. Running from the fall-out, she found a refuge in the secluded but oddly welcoming town of Cainsville, Illinois, but she couldn’t resist trying to dig out the truth about her birth parents’ crimes. She began working with Gabriel Walsh, a fiendishly successful criminal lawyer who also had links to the town; their investigation soon revealed Celtic mysteries at work in Cainsville, and also entangled Olivia in a tense love triangle with the calculating Gabriel and her charming biker boyfriend, Ricky. Worse, troubling visions revealed to Olivia that the three of them were reenacting an ancient drama pitting the elders of Cainsville against the mysterious Huntsmen with Olivia as the prize.

 Now, in the series finale, forces continue to work within Cainsville as the elders and the Huntsmen each try to persuade Olivia to their side. Worse still, Liv’s feelings for Ricky and Gabriel remain a tangled mess, not helped by visions that in this triangle, everything hinges on her choice. But time is up, and Olivia has not chosen. Things come to a head as Seanna, Gabriel’s drug addict mother who he thought was dead, makes a surprise reappearance, alongside the revelation of a third supernatural force–a dark and malevolent entity that has had its eye on Olivia since she was a baby and wants to win at any cost.

 In the series’ fifth and final novel, Kelley Armstrong delivers a final scary and surprising knock-out twist.

The only witness able to clear Liv’s father of the murder charges is dead before she and Gabriel can reach her. To make a bad day worse, when they return to the office a woman is there claiming to be a relative of Gabriel’s and it turns out she is not lying, she is Gabriel’s mother back from the dead.  Liv has a vision that might give them a lead on the truth of the first murder her parents were accused of and how the victims were linked.   Meanwhile both the fae of Cainsville and the fae of The Hunt will soon be starting a serious campaign to win Liv to their side.

We learn more about Gabriel’s past and why he is so emotionally shut off from others. Liv, Ricky and Gabriel grow into and accept that they are not the reincarnation of but the current version of three fae whose choices led to a war between the two fae factions.  There is a surprising turn of events as forces each try to manipulate the three into choosing their path, and thus destruction of the other.  The action roars along to a satisfying conclusion for the book and the series.  While things are tied up nicely in this book in browsing the web I see there are short stories set both before and after the events of this book that I will need to find because I am not quite ready to say goodbye to these characters or to Cainsville. Highly recommended. ~~ Stephanie L Bannon

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