Diamond Fire by Ilona Andrews Series: Hidden Legacy #3.5
Published by Avon on November 6, 2018
Genres: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 160
Format: eBook
Source: Advance Reader Copy, edelweiss
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Nevada Frida Baylor and Connor Ander Rogan cordially invite you to join their wedding celebration. Summoning, weather manipulation, and other magical activities strictly forbidden.
Catalina Baylor is looking forward to wearing her maid of honor dress and watching her older sister walk down the aisle. Then the wedding planner gets escorted off the premises, the bride’s priceless tiara disappears, and Rogan's extensive family overruns his mother’s home. Someone is cheating, someone is lying, and someone is plotting murder.
To make this wedding happen, Catalina will have to do the thing she fears most: use her magic. But she’s a Baylor and there’s nothing she wouldn't do for her sister's happiness. Nevada will have her fairy tale wedding, even if Catalina has to tear the mansion apart brick by brick to get it done.
This novella is the bridge between Nevada’s books and what will be Catalina’s series. It’s so, so well done. Nevada and Rogan have more than earned their happy ending after their books, so moving on to Nevada’s sister
Catalina works for me.
Catalina is in charge of Nevada and Rogan’s wedding. When half his family wants to kill them, it makes for an interesting guest list.
When a family heirloom is stolen, Rogan’s mother asks Catalina to find it without letting anyone else know it’s missing. In her search for the tiara, Catalina finds out quite a bit about Nevada’s soon-to-be in-laws. Someone is plotting something, but as she follows one tip, it will lead to another, and another until she is finally learning way more than she ever wanted. However, all of that information comes in handy when all these different players try to play their hand.
Everyone is staying in Rogan’s mother’s home, so with all these relatives, many of whom don’t like each other, all in close quarters, tempers fly. And Catalina has to find the tiara without insulting any of these high level primes.
I loved seeing more insight into Catalina and who she is, how she’ll be as a main character, and how she’ll handle things. She’s not Nevada, and that’s a good thing! She’s coming into her own, and I am ready for her first full-length book. I enjoyed the family dynamics of the Baylor family, and it’s neat to see everyone growing and dealing with everything without Nevada leading them. It feels organic, it feels normal, and I didn’t find myself missing Nevada as a narrator. I only had one complaint and that is that I felt the ending was a bit abrupt. Well, maybe not abrupt, but fast. Like the pacing changed and it felt rushed a bit.
If you haven’t read the Hidden Legacy books, you won’t be confused, however, you probably won’t get as much enjoyment out of this book.
***ARC courtesy of Avon Impulse
