Dangerous Creatures (Dangerous Creatures #1) by Kami Garcia & Magaret Stohl

A new series returns to the world of Beautiful Creatures. Some loves are cursed…others are dangerous.

Ridley Duchannes will be the first to tell you that she’s a bad girl. She’s Dark. She’s a Siren. You can never trust her, or even yourself when she’s around. Lucky for her, Wesley “Link” Lincoln can never seem to remember that; quarter Incubus or not, his heart is Mortal when it comes to Ridley. When Link heads to New York City to start a music career, Ridley goes along for the ride-and she has her own reasons. As if leaving small-town Gatlin for the big city, trying to form a band, and surviving life with a partially reformed Siren isn’t hard enough already, Link soon learns he has a price on his head that no Caster or Mortal can ever pay.

Sometimes you pick up a book just because you can’t resist. That’s what happened when I requested an ARC of Dangerous Creatures. I loved the world that Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl created in the Caster Chronicles series. The Dangerous Creatures series is a spin-off of that series. I hesitated for a millisecond before I picked this one up, only because I’ve only read the first book in the previous series. I knew going in that I would inevitably run across some spoilers and that there would be times that I would be lost. Do I regret my decision to pick up Dangerous Creatures before catching up with the rest of the Caster Chronicles series? Maybe just a teeny, tiny bit, but not enough to not want to get my hands on the next book in this series as soon as it’s available. (More on that later….)

There was a lot to like about Dangerous Creatures. There were more than a few characters that were familiar and some that weren’t. Even if I hadn’t read Beautiful Creatures, I would have been fine picking up Dangerous Creatures. There’s enough back story to keep new readers in the loop. There were parts that were border line silly, but those moments didn’t last long because there were life and death moments that followed. Link and Ridley were an interesting pair to say the least. The ‘friends’ that they made in New York were even more interesting. This book had twists, turns and then came right back to where you were in the beginning. I loved every minute of it!

Ridley pretty much broke my heart in Dangerous Creatures. She took things for granted, she wasn’t perfect, but she also didn’t feel like she deserved anything beyond what she received.  She made a lot of bad decisions, but she also cared a lot more than she wanted to admit.

This is one of those books that merit a re-read. I’m sure that I’ll get a lot more out of it the next time I read it, which will probably happen after I finish the Caster Chronicles series. One thing that reading Dangerous Creatures did was make me want to go back and play catch up. If you decide to pick this one up, which I highly recommend, play close attention to the flash back scenes. They’re not just filler, they reveal more than you think…. trust me, you can thank me later.

As for the way things end? Oh, I won’t spoil that for you. All I’ll say is that it’s been a while since I read a book that ended leaving my jaw dropping as much as Dangerous Creatures did. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the way the authors left things…. Repeat after me “Authors Are Evil.”