Shadow's Messenger – T.A. White

A fun read. The author takes familiar fantasy ingredients and does something interesting with them.

Aileen Travers finds out the hard way that vampires (and werewolves and witches and so on) exist, when she is attacked by a vampire and left for dead - and wakes up with a yen for blood. Yes, there is a supernatural society alongside our mundane one. And it has its own politics and its own pecking order. And baby vampires are pretty-much at the bottom of that pecking order.

Travers works as a supernatural bicycle messenger to pay the rent (the customers are supernatural; the bike is not), and keeps her head down. Until bad luck puts her in hock to a sorcerer. Who wants her to help investigate some killings. And who wants her to serve him for a century. The investigation forces her into contact with older vampires - who also expect her to spend a century doing what she’s told. It’s her situation as a relatively-powerless supernatural that makes this book work.

The protagonist’s unaffiliated position requires some heavy-handed plot devices. The writing has too much of an establishing-a-new-series feel to it. And the characters other than Travers are poorly-established. But I’m still giving the book four stars, because it clicked as an enjoyable light read.