I was blown away by 'Night's Edge' by Liz Kerin, which I reviewed a year ago this month, and this is the promised sequel. While the first book works well as a standalone volume, this doesn't and it's clear that Kerin isn't particularly interested in filling us in if we're new to the story here, or indeed even if we aren't and need a refresher. That means that I'd suggest that there are two viable ways to dive in: either just read the first book and be done, ignoring this second one, or read both in a single effort. This does grow the story and takes Mia much further than she ever could in the first book, but I'm not sure that it should.

I will provide a refresher, just in case, and it's that this is a vampire duology that never uses the V word. There's a disease called Saratov's Syndrome that escaped the former USSR in the nineties, a disease that's spread through bites and leaves its victims, known as Saras, thirsting for blood and unable to tolerate sunlight. We spend the first book with Izzy and Mia, mother and daughter, who find their lives turned upside down when Izzy becomes a Sara, through what we have to assume is a deliberate act by a Sara named Devon. Mia is ten when that happens, so her second decade isn't remotely appropriate and the metaphors are legion. Chapters alternate between 2010, when this is new for them, and 2023, when Mia is older and starting to wish for an actual life of her own.

This second book continues quickly from the first. The chapters alternate again, but much closer in time period. Now is March 2024, when Mia has become a Sara herself and has some sort of mission in Colorado with a fellow Sara called Cora. Then is late 2023, in Tucson, after the events of the first book. Izzy is dead, though there's no burial so Devon seems to think that she might be alive, and, if so, is a traitor to his cause who should be hunted down. Mia continues on, but has to tie up a lot of loose ends before she can begin her life proper, selling their house and business and dealing with the potential continued threat from Devon.

Kerin flouts our expectations from the very outset. For one, while Mia is still very much human in the "then" chapters, she's clearly a Sara in the "now" ones, so there's a major story still to unfold. I was surprised, almost shocked, to find Mia a Sara, but the concept has value. This book is simply dripping with trauma, so, while Mia is a strong and vividly drawn character, she's also broken from a life that was effectively stolen from her. Turning her into a predator is a way to theoretically get past that but also to highlight that Saratov's isn't the solution that we might expect from decades of romantic vampire stories.

For another, Jade has left for Seattle, which ends a promising relationship before it can begin in earnest. I for one was hoping that it would, now that all the obstacles have been removed. After all, Jade was Mia's escape from her mother literally living off her and, with Izzy dead, they could live happily ever after. Needless to say, that doesn't happen, and Jade vanishes immediately. She does return, at one point, after Mia has moved to New York and Jade's band tours there, but it's clear that Mia hasn't escaped her past at all, even with the change in scenery, so there's nothing to be done.

Instead, she tackles her past head-on. Devon refuses to leave her alone, so she returns the favour, dedicating herself to taking him down. This is where this story grows into something very different from the first book. In that, Kerin did some worldbuilding to hold up her ideas, but she focused on Izzy and Mia with such depth that it was a claustrophobic book about being trapped in a troubled relationship, hiding her mother because she's a Sara an obvious parallel to hiding her mother for being a drug addict, a child abuser or a beaten housewife. Here, the world opens up, as indeed it should now that mum is dead and Mia can do whatever she wants.

What she wants turns out to be a volunteer at a Sara center in New York, as a researcher and to help us learn about this new world Kerin has created. There are medical advances with a cure possible. Daylights are injections that gift Saras with six hours of safe sun. There are other lethal injections that destroy Saras utterly. Of course, Saras are far too dangerous to be allowed to live free, so the government sets up centres where they can live in a controlled environment that doesn't prompt danger for regular folk. New words are conjured up, like "banking", "invo" and "lifted", to meet a new set of linguistic needs.

And there's Devon Shaw, who's living free as an outlaw and trying to bulk up the numbers of free Saras because he believes that they're destined to take over, to enslave the human population to become a food supply. He even has a published manifesto, 'On the Origin of a New Species', which firmly establishes him as not only the villain in Mia's life but the villain in the lives of everyone in this future world. That makes this at once a personal quest for vengeance and an attempt to save the world on a much grander scale, all wrapped in the same story.

With Jade mostly gone from Mia's life, she shifts to Cora, who she meets at the Sara center in New York, where she's a resident. She's the new love interest for Mia but also a means to an end, which deepens her involvement. There's a lot of depth and plotting here in the middle of the book and it slows the story down considerably. I didn't like that while I was reading the book, because it broke the flow, but I do understand why Kerin felt the need to include them and I do see the value in the effective pause. The fact that Cora is also a Sara camgirl who goes by QT_Core spices things up just a little but not enough.

I liked this as a story, though I felt that it's not as successful as the first book. That's not atypical for me, because I often prefer more focused, claustrophobic stories with condensed casts to their broader, world-expanding follow ups. I much prefer 'Alien' to 'Aliens', for example, for this precise reason. It tells a much smaller story but with far more depth. That holds here with 'Night's Edge' and 'First Light'. It certainly gets to where it needs to get, which is a little further than we might expect, and I appreciated the unexpected ending that followed the expected one.

Kerin created a rich world in this duology, but I think its real value isn't in the worldbuilding but in how many ways it can be applied to our own reality. The first book is about being trapped and this second book is about trauma, with the potential reasons for either being legion. I cared about Mia even if I didn't care much for her quest, but how this will stay with me isn't going to be about what she does, it's going to be about what she represents. That's where the real power is here. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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