‘Red-Headed Stepchild’ – Jaye Wells (Orbit)

I’ve been staying away from urban fantasy (that’s urban fantasy with feisty leather clad ladies hunting down/falling in love with the undead) for the last couple of weeks, purely because I was starting to feel like each new book I picked up was a carbon copy of the last. I’m cool with people writing for a particular audience but the bottom line is I’m not part of that audience and I’m after different stuff...
Last night I thought to myself that maybe it was time to give urban fantasy another go and see what happened this time around. You can guess what happened by the fact that I am going to break with tradition and give you the blurb from Amazon, I didn’t read enough of the book to be able to tell you what it’s about...

In a world where being of mixed-blood is a major liability, Sabina doesn't really fit in. And being an assassin - the only profession fit for an outcast - doesn't help matters. But she's never brought her work home. Until now. Her latest mission is uncomfortably complex, and threatens the fragile peace between the vampire and mage races. As Sabina scrambles to figure out which side she's on, she uncovers a tangled political web, some nasty facts about her family and some unexpected new talents. Any of these things could be worryingly life-changing, but together, they could be fatal...

I only got about twenty pages in before I put this one down. There was nothing here that marked ‘Red-Headed Stepchild’ out as different from the rest of the pack. Sabina Kane is a bad ass outsider who’s in your face and not to be messed with; this would be cool if it wasn’t for the fact that Anita Blake, Jaz Parks, Mercy Thompson and Jill Kismet (amongst others) are pretty much the same character...
Wells appears to try and get round this by infusing the plot with lots of confrontations and energy, effectively trying to make Sabina Kane harder than her contemporaries. The only problem is that Kane has so little originality as a character that this approach came across to me like a pastiche of the sub-genre...
It was this line that killed it for me...

“What? No! David’s been like a brother to me since we went through assassin school together.”

‘Assassin school’? Really...? Kane may have said this with a straight face but I wasn’t sure if Wells was being serious or not. I didn’t stick around to find out, solitaire on the iPod can work just as well (for whiling away the commute) as a book ;o)

If this is what you’re after, out of urban fantasy, then you’ll probably really enjoy ‘Red-Headed Stepchild’. It wasn’t for me though...