A Lick of Frost - Laurell K. Hamilton

A Lick of Frost (Merry Gentry #6)
Laurell K. Hamilton
Ballantine Books
Copyright: 2008
978-0345495914

The amazon.com product description:

I am Meredith Gentry, princess and heir apparent to the throne in the realm of faerie, onetime private investigator in the mortal world. To be crowned queen, I must first continue the royal bloodline and give birth to an heir of my own. If I fail, my aunt, Queen Andais, will be free to do what she most desires: install her twisted son, Cel, as monarch . . . and kill me.

My royal guards surround me, and my best loved–my Darkness and my Killing Frost–are always beside me, sworn to protect and make love to me. But still the threat grows greater. For despite all my carnal efforts, I remain childless, while the machinations of my sinister, sadistic Queen and her confederates remain tireless. So my bodyguards and I have slipped back into Los Angeles, hoping to outrun the gathering shadows of court intrigue. But even exile isn’t enough to escape the grasp of those with dark designs.

Now King Taranis, powerful and vainglorious ruler of faerie’s Seelie Court, has leveled accusations against my noble guards of a heinous crime–and has gone so far as to ask the mortal authorities to prosecute. If he succeeds, my men face extradition to faerie and the hideous penalties that await them there. But I know that Taranis’s charges are baseless, and I sense that his true target is me. He tried to kill me when I was a child. Now I fear his intentions are far more terrifying.

Remember when I was commenting on the lack of resolution a couple of books ago? They were all building up to this one! And what a resolution! I couldn't put A Lick of Frost down for long. I just had to come back and read some more.

This time, because I'm back-to-back reading the series, I found that I didn't have the problems I did reading it last time (probably with a year or so gap from reading the previous book).

A Lick of Frost is the sixth book in the Merry Gentry series, following on Mistral's Kiss. The first book in this series was A Kiss of Shadows.

Some of the many plot threads were tied up in A Lick of Frost, but not all of them, and I can't wait to get into the next book to find out how things are going to play out next. Intercourt politics are definitely becoming a big issue for Merry and her guards, and we're seeing how it plays out in the human world. It was rather nice being back in the human world for this one, after a couple of books that were almost entirely set in Faerie.

I also really enjoyed getting some more hints at the impact an openly known of magical world has had on history. There have been quite a few references to fears of another Seelie/Unseelie war, and now I know why. Apparently, somewhere in Europe in that world there is still a massive crater left from the last one! Yikes!

Not suited for everyone, but by now, that should be clear about almost all of Laurell K. Hamilton's books as she tends to be both explicit and graphic at times. However, if that's not going to bother you, these are turning into great reads for the most part.

I know I felt that Mistral's Kiss was too short in my last review, but this one didn't feel that way at all. It's not as long as the first four books in the series, but A Lick of Frost was still longer than Mistral's Kiss by a little bit. I think the difference might have also been due to the amount going on in the book.

Definitely a read that I enjoyed, and I'm looking forward to starting the next book in the series, Swallowing Darkness.