Hunting in Bruges (Hunters' Guild, #1)

by E J Stevens

[Melanie]

Review originally posted at RabidReads.ca.

3.5 stars

I’ve been a fan of the Ivy Granger series for a while. This spinoff series follows a character we meet in the Ivy Granger series. It takes place after book three in Ivy Granger, but can be read as a stand alone series. Jenna is a hunter. She works for the Hunter’s Guild and can see ghosts. She really likes to kill vampires and strings their fangs on a necklace as a trophy.

So, Jenna is shipped off to Bruges, Belgium to help them find out why so many people are turning up dead. Most of the hunters are in Brussels for a big meeting, so the Bruges guild is running on a skeleton crew. The man left in charge is quite the ass. He doesn’t like women and doesn’t think they should be hunters, so him and Jenna get off on the wrong foot right from the start.

I should back up a bit, on the train to Bruges from Brussels, Jenna meets a man named Ash. He shows her around Bruges just a bit before she goes to the guild. During this time, we get a good picture of Bruges. The descriptions are really great. I loved hearing about the architecture of the old buildings.

So, back to the guild, there is Simon Chadwick who is in charge of the guild for right now and he is an ass. There is also Celeste, who is a witch that is also a bit of a junkie. She smokes stuff that would be toxic to a human, but just gets witches high. It can also cause them to lose their memory and not be very good with magic any more. Aleksey Zharkov is a one-handed guy that is the demolitions expert for the team. He likes his job a little too much. Darryl Lambert is a blind librarian who gets around pretty well, even with his handicap. Last, but not least is Benjamin Martens, the doc.

So Jenna has to find out who is killing people in Bruges and just leaving them on the street and with this ragtag group of hunters. And while Ash is trying to sight see and socialize with her.

This is a fun story. There is a lot of action and, as I said, the descriptions of the town are great. It is a bit predictable. There are a few things that I figured out pretty quickly, but I still enjoyed the story. I would love to read more stories about Jenna. She really took control and grew in this story. I didn’t love this story as much as the Ivy Granger stories. While, I enjoyed the secondary characters in this, I didn’t like them as much as Jinx and the gang back in Harborsmouth. I do think this is a great addition for people who are looking to start learning about this world or for people already familiar with Ivy Granger.

Narration
This audiobook is recorded in a format called duet. It features a female and male narrator. In this book, the female does the majority of the narration, because this book is told entirely from the woman’s POV. She does all the narration for the female dialogues and the non-dialogue pieces of the story. The male just read the sentence from the male POVs. This is not my favorite form of audiobook. I find it a bit jarring at first when the male narrator comes in during the middle of a chapter (so far, this is the only series that I listen to that is recorded in this format). The more I listen to the story, the more I’m okay with it, but at the start of each book, it always takes me a bit to get into it. I know people who love this format and prefer it over anything else. So this is a person thing for me. If you haven’t tried this format, I suggest you give it a try sometime and see what you think of it.

I will say that I do like these narrators. I think they both do a really good job. I like the voices that they use for each of the characters. I did think that this sounded a lot like Ivy, though it is hard for me to say for sure because it has been over a year since I listened to my last Ivy Granger book. I would listen to this pair again.

**I like to thank the author for providing me with a copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.