Review: Spider’s Bite by Jennifer Estep

<Spider’s Bite by Jen­nifer Estep

My rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book, and plan to go on to the next book in the series, Web of Lies. I’m hop­ing that Jen­nifer Estep grows as an author, though, as the fore­shad­ow­ing regard­ing the real “big bad” as well as the rev­e­la­tion of a fact impor­tant to the main char­ac­ter were both rather clum­sily done, in my opinion.

I’m aware of another series by Estep, Big­time. I was think­ing of read­ing it, but it was writ­ten ear­lier than the Ele­men­tal Assas­sin series, and now I’m not so sure about whether I want to read it or not. Estep’s char­ac­ters are inter­est­ing, but I’m not sure that they’re inter­est­ing enough to hold me through writ­ing that’s less pol­ished than Spider’s Bite. Then again, I’ve cer­tainly read worse. I sup­pose it all depends on what I hap­pen to have in hand at any given time. I’d be more likely to read it if there were short sto­ries avail­able sim­i­lar to the ones on Estep’s website that drew me into this series.

I didn’t do reviews for them, but there are three sto­ries that occur chrono­log­i­cally before Spider’s Bite: Poi­son Web of Deceit and Spider’s Bar­gain. Read­ing them cer­tainly isn’t nec­es­sary to enjoy the novel, and it’s def­i­nitely bet­ter to avoid read­ing Web of Deceit first. They are good sto­ries, though, and I do rec­om­mend that any­one who enjoys Estep’s work seek them out in order to enjoy the addi­tional bits of infor­ma­tion gained in them. For instance, Spider’s Bar­gain is the story of an event that is piv­otal to Gin and Caine’s rela­tion­ship, and its con­se­quences are likely to con­tinue echo­ing through the next few vol­umes of the series.

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