I’ve been reading these books back-to-back, so cue my utter confusion when there were references to things I didn’t remember reading in the first 4 books. I was convinced I’d accidentally skipped an installment and needed to go back. But no, apparently a lot happened in the first 2 “spinoff” books set in a time period between books 4 and 5 of the Night Huntress series. I have not read those books but I’ve had a ton of details revealed to me about what happened in those books through dialogue and references in This Side of the Grave.

This was annoying to me for a multitude of reasons — mainly, there are these new characters and relationships that feel really foreign to me but are written in such a way that it seems the reader is expected to already have a connection with them. I kind of felt like I was robbed. I waffled with the idea of going to read those first two books of the spin-off because they actually sound like they’d be pretty interesting, however, I was so underwhelmed with how this book played out that I think I’m going to take a break from the series for a while (as long as the description of the next book isn’t too tantalizing). I was pretty bored with the plot of This Side of the Grave. The saving grace for my rating is that I like the characters that I’ve gotten to know over the course of the series.