In 2010, Jennifer Estep, author of the YA series Mythos Academy, published Spider’s Bite, the first book in the Elemental Assassin series featuring Gin Blanco, a.k.a. The Spider. Since then, she’s cranked out about two titles a year, chronicling the bloody adventures of The Spider, an assassin with, yes, a very particular set of skills. Books in the series include Spider’s Bite, Web of Lies, Venom, Tangled Threads, Spider’s Revenge, By a Thread, Widow’s Web, Deadly Sting, Heart of Venom, and The Spider. Two e-novellas, Thread of Death and Kiss of Venom, are also available. A new book, Poison Promise, will be released in July 2014.
Gin Blanco was orphaned as a young child when power-hungry elemental Mab Monroe killed her mother and sisters in an attempt to wipe out a family whose powers were said to surpass her own. Gin survives and is taken in by an assassin named Fletcher Lane, who raises her and teaches her to be a ruthless killer-for-hire like himself. When Book 1 opens, Gin is thirty years old and already has made quite a name for herself as the assassin The Spider. We meet Gin on a job; she’s gone undercover in a mental institution to get close to a predatory shrink who preyed on her clients. She dispatches the shrink–and job for which she is being paid handsomely–then offs an orderly who rapes patients, just on principle, before escaping back to Fletcher’s BBQ joint, the Pork Pit.
We also learn that Gin has Stone Magic–she is an Elemental, or someone who has magic based on one of the four elements: Stone, Air, Ice, or Fire. Gin can “listen” to stone, draw power from it, and even make her skin rock-hard to protect against attacks. But she also has Ice magic, and her dual talents make her unusual and powerful–and an object of concern for Fire Elemental Mab Monroe, who is just one of many archenemies that Gin faces during the course of the novels.
As a character, Gin is delightful: she’s ruthless yet principled (as her execution of the rapist orderly demonstrates) and she’s fearless. And she’s super, super good with knives. Her tragic past sets up some conflicts that drive the earlier novels, but her transition from highly paid assassin to one-woman wrecking crew, determined to clean up the corrupt and violent city in which she lives, makes her far more enemies as the series progresses. As an assassin, she kills people for money–sometimes, as in the case of the shrink, they’re people who seem to deserve killing, since they are killers themselves. But others seem less deserving, and that makes Gin a little bit of an antihero, at least in the beginning.
A personal tragedy shifts Gin’s attention from murder-for-hire to revenge and then sets her on the path to trying to clean up the city. With this, Gin loses a bit of the complexity that makes her so interesting. It’s all black hats and white hats now–Gin vs. the legion of evildoers that populate the city and surroundings. She becomes a kind of Robin Hood, defending the defenseless and taking on all comers, especially Mab and her crew and others who prey on the weak. As Gin says in Spider’s Bite: “I’d never liked bullies.”
Over the course of the novels, Gin’s magic grows, as does her desire to right past wrongs–that is, get revenge on Mab Monroe for destroying her family. Love interests come and go in her life; unlike some urban fantasy series, Gin’s identity is not tied to one “true love.” Her ruthlessness and desire for vengeance aren’t altogether compatible with romance. There’s heartbreak aplenty for The Spider. But when you’re a highly paid assassin commanding more than a million dollars per hit, and you’ve made enemies with every crime boss and powerful Elemental in town, that’s not entirely unexpected.
In the most recent two books, however, Estep seems to be reaching for something for Gin to fight; the complexities of the earlier books have given way to a bad-guy-of-the-week structure that is less satisfying for those who have been on board since the beginning. And the bad guys are so over-the-top bad that it’s almost funny. Each baddie has to be 10x worse than the last. The problem is that can’t keep going indefinitely, and I feel that in Heart of Venom we may have reached a tipping point with the baddie: he’s so odious as to be beyond belief. Which is a problem, since willing suspension of disbelief can only get you so far.
My hope is that Estep will let go of the baddie-of-the-week structure and develop some more twisty plotlines that carry over between books more. We’ve still got some baddies form the early books to deal with, but it looks like Gin has lost her groove a bit. It’s time to sharpen those knives again. Body count alone doesn’t make for a great book; if that were the case, Heart of Venom would be five stars. We know that Gin is ruthless; we don’t need to see her kill fifty evil henchmen to believe it. But Gin’s magic is more interesting than dispatching a self-styled woods emperor and his flunkies, even if they do enjoy playing the most dangerous game with college coeds and Gin’s friends. Time for a reboot and a return to what made the series great to begin with, before it loses its way entirely.
MY RATING: 4 out of 5 stakes (but sliding downward)
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