Wild Country by Anne Bishop

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Content: Strong Language, A non-descript sex scene, Off page torture and rape 



There are ghost towns in the world—places where the humans were annihilated in retaliation for the slaughter of the shape-shifting Others.

One of those places is Bennett, a town at the northern end of the Elder Hills—a town surrounded by the wild country. Now efforts are being made to resettle Bennett as a community where humans and Others live and work together.

But as they reopen the stores and the professional offices and start to make lives for themselves, the town of Bennett attracts the attention of other humans looking for profit.

I enjoyed this book, but not quite as much as the previous ones set in this world. As this story focuses on the resettlement of the town Bennett there were a lot of different character points of view. That in itself wasn't bad, but it did take the story a while to find it's footing. This book was definitely an ensemble cast without a true main character and I have mixed feelings about that. In general I felt like I got to know the characters I wanted to get to know the most, but there were others that felt more like window dressing that could have been shone more. Some of them just seemed to have been added to create a little more drama or tension and little else, like Maddie and her family. Even though they were likable I just didn't see the need. I felt like the character of Abigail could have been left out of the story altogether as well. I just didn't really feel like she added all that much to it.

Yet again we have a book where the humans think they can overcome the terra indigene, and of course are sadly mistaken. Tolya summed it up pretty well in this book...

"But you are cattle in a pen, Mr. Blackstone, "Tolya said.

The wild west feel that permeated the book was kind of fun, and I liked the build up to the "showdown" but I was a little disappointed at how long it took the terra indigene to act in this book, and a couple of the human outlaw deaths were not as gruesome as I had hoped they would be (yes I know, call me morbid), but overall this was a pretty good read. I'm not sure what direction the author will go in other books in this series, but I'm still interested.

Thanks to Netgalley and Berkley Publishing Group for providing me with an advanced copy of this book.