When Jaz Parks is called back from London for a meeting with her boss in Ohio she thinks that he’s going to fire her. That might be problem; there aren’t many job openings out there for highly trained, moral assassin with a troubled past who’s been pink slipped by the CIA. Instead, she’s assigned to protect Vayl, a centuries old vampire who’s one of the CIA’s most deadly assassins. Jaz is sceptical about Vayl’s need for protection – he can hypnotise men with a look and freeze them to death with a touch and those are only the powers he’s known for – but she’s willing to go along if it means she can keep her job.

It’s the only thing that keeps her sane most days.

Six months later she and Vayl are sent to Miami to infiltrate a terrorist cult that worshipped a chaos goddess. A simple enough job on the surface, but the arrival of Vayl’s vicious ex-wife and the discovery of a traitor in the highest echelons of their organization complicates it.  Events spiral out of control and Jaz and Vayl will need all their combined talents and more if they hope to save themselves, and the world.

*Once Bitten, Twice Shy* is a fast-paced spy thriller that just happens to be set in a paranormal fantasy world. The action is detailed, the stakes are high, the bad guys are inhuman – literally as well as figuratively, and the banter is quick-witted and acid. It reminds me a little of Denis Wheatley had he written in the urban fantasy genre. There’s romance there too, but although it’s a strong element in the narrative the romance is not the focus of the plot.  That said -  I am rooting for Jaz and Vayl’s partnership to develop into romance further down the road. Or in the next few novels.

Jaz, herself, is a fun character whose inner monologue exhibits an enjoyable combination of self-mockery and confidence. One of the most winning elements about her character for me is that her traumas and her romance aren’t the central motivating force for her character. Revenge is certainly something she wants, and an important plot point, but it doesn’t run her. She does what she does because she’s good at it and it’s her career. 

And Jaz is good at what she does. Despite her initial scepticism -  a stand-in for the reader who would have doubtless wondered themselves on meeting Vayl – she more than holds her own in the partnership. Vayl might be powerful and deadly, but it’s Jaz who throws herself into the thick of things. She’s the brawler, in at the fists and feet end of things. It’s the glimpses of that Jaz – a pragmatic, canny and calculating fighter – that convince me of her standing as an operative. Something helped along by the fact that Jennifer Rardin has a genuine talent for writing fight scenes, combining vivid description with the claustrophobic chaos of a multi-person fight.

There were, however, elements of the novel that didn’t quite work for me. I liked Jaz as a character but aspects of her personality never quite rang true to me. Perhaps it was just that there was so much of it. She was a highly trained CIA assassin, a traumatised front-line fighter just beginning to piece together what had happened to her, a loving – sorta, more or less - daughter, a wise-cracking partner and a woman tentatively considering love again. Although I can accept the concept of a character who encompasses all those things, seeing her be all those things at once during the course of the novel was a little hard to keep up with. She seemed to veer from one extreme to the next. A linked problem was the amount of exposition needed to set up the characters backgrounds and motivations.  Conversations or reveries about events that had happened were shoe-horned into the narrative at odd places. It didn’t seem organic.

To a degree, however, I am willing to forgive that – at least for this book. The first person narrative structure confines us to the limits of Jaz’s consciousness and knowledge. Everything the reader knows has to be filtered through what Jaz knows or conversations she’s privy too. Combine that with the need for setting up both a world different but similar to our own and a systematic mythology for both magic and covert-ops organisations and a little of bit of exposition can certainly be understood. I suspect that future books will be a much smoother read and I’ll certainly be giving them a try. Despite the few issues I mention here I did enjoy the book. Once the setting and backgrounds had been established and the caper was well under way I was caught up in Jaz’s world. Her character hit its stride as well, the dissonant elements of her personality blending together much better than they did initially.