Review--City of Souls

The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac

Vicki Pettersson's Zodiac series is one of my faves, the books are so gripping that you can barely believe all the things that happened. The protagonist, Olivia/Joanna, goes through a lot of turmoil yet she still comes back up again. For those who haven't read the series yet this is a must-read-series, starting with book 1 of course, it's important that you read them in order because like many other series, this is not a stand alone novel.

The books in order are:

The Scent of Shadows
The Taste of the Night
The Touch of Twilight
City of Souls

And now without further ado, my opinions on the book. City of Souls opens up a shirt while after The Touch of Twilight ended, with some time going by. Suzanne, Cher's mother and Olivia's closest friends, is celebrating her engagement to an Indian prince. But the party ends shortly for Olivia for she learns that her backup for that night, incase something with the Shadows happened, was missing and Hunter showed up instead in a very surprising manner.

Hunter and her immediately leave to join the rest of their troop to figure out what to do about their missing member. And after following a trail left by their enemies they find their troop member being held hostage by the Shadows in a safe zone, but they soon learn that things are still changing in their city due to Olivia, while it wasn't entirely her fault.

It has become clear now that there are no more safe zones for the Agents of Light, and Warren wants Olivia to fix this by going into Midheaven, a world that hides near our mortal one. Midheaven was an utterly strange place, it was like a scene from a John Wayne movie, back in the West--it was fun and interesting, but this is when all Olivia's problems begin. She was sent on a mission to find Jaden Jacks, the one who once broke a changeling and supposedly knew how to fix one as well. Since Olivia had left part of her chi in Jasmine which gave Jasmine a share of her powers, leaving her sister Li, and predecessor damaged and dying. So Olivia must try to fix Jas in order to save her and Li.

But Midheaven provides no easy answers for Olivia and she loses more than she thought possible, but manages to escape. She also meets some formidable foes there in the shapes of women. Women who rule Midheaven and take what they want when they want. They are hard to understand, for me at least, they have their own agenda but I never got a clear meaning as to what they were really after. Their leader Solange is the strangest of them all.

Her love life with Hunter, as we saw in The Touch of Twilight is still on the rocks, but there are some very heated moments between them.

Olivia soon learns more than she ever wanted to about what was really going on. There is a traitor in their midsts who had been telling Regean, yeah she's still around, information that should've remained secret. She learns the riddle of how to heal Jas without killing her, but as I said it's a riddle so it's hard to figure out.

I don't want to give away anything too vital to the story but at the end a LOT of things happen that come together, to make some things make sense. Of course the ending still leaves you with questions burning inside your head.

At points the novel was a little slow, just where things were taking too long to happen, but there was still plenty of action, so to speak, surrounding those moments. I would love to say more, but I fear that anymore info might be considered a spoiler and I don't want to spoil the novel for anyone. But as I said the ending is phenomenal! It will literally blow you away! That's all I can say really, I'm trying to be vague here because I hate ruining the ending of books/movies even, for people who haven't read/seen them.