Just Finished Reading: Broken by Kelly Armstrong

When Elena Michaels’ werewolf pack is offered the location of a human eating solitary in exchange for some breaking and entering it’s a hard to turn down. Even when told that the object of the theft is the infamous ‘From Hell’ letter supposedly penned by Jack the Ripper the alarm bells remain silent. If only things were that simple! When Elena accidently opens a dimensional portal hidden in the letter with a drop of her blood, the pack is faced with the task of cleaning up the mess. With seemingly unstoppable zombies, disease carrying super rats and a series of grisly murders they certainly have their hands full. Making things worse – if such a thing was possible – is that Elena is heavily pregnant with the first successfully produced werewolf babies in centuries.

After the rather poor previous novels in this series, Industrial Magic and Haunted, I was hoping that Armstrong would be back on form with her strongest character Elena Michaels. It was not to be. Practically from the outset this book was poorly plotted and very slow. The idea of a dimensional portal hidden in a famous letter was on the face of it an interesting one but even that was badly handled. The characterisation – if I can call it that – was lacklustre at best and, too often, almost insulting to readers with discernment. The ‘bad-guy’ was blatantly obvious from also the moment he appeared yet none of the main characters could see him for what he was. This particular blind spot was very annoying but not as annoying as the juvenile dialogue and meaningless ‘plot twists’ – and don’t even get me started on the lesbian vampire with the hots for Elena, just don’t OK!

I have one more book by Kelly Armstrong somewhere in ‘the Pile’ but on the evidence of the growing string of turkeys it’ll be staying in there for quite some time. Even if you’re a fan of Urban Fantasy I’d avoid this like a plague of Zombies.