Review: Chaos Choreography

Chaos Choreography by Seanan McGuire
Series: InCryptid #5
Rating: ★★★★★

Verity Price is back on the West Coast and getting back into the swing of the family business: cryptozoology. She’s rescuing cryptids from bad situations, protecting them from monster-hunters, and generally risking life and limb for the greater good, with her ex-Covenant partner/husband, Dominic, by her side. Her ballroom dance career is behind her…or so she thinks.

 

When Verity gets the call from the producers of Dance or Die, the reality show she almost won several years before, she finds the lure of a comeback impossible to resist, and she and Dominic are off to L.A. for one last shot at the big time.

 

Of course, nothing is that simple. When two of her fellow contestants turn up dead, Verity will need every ally she can find—and a couple she wasn’t looking for—in order to navigate the complicated steps of both the tango and a murder investigation without blowing her cover. It doesn’t help that her official family backup is her grandmother, Alice…

Though I’ve loved every book (and all of the many short stories) in this series, I was extremely excited to get back to Verity. Especially after reading the short-stories that were set while she and Dominic drove across country from New York to her family home in Oregon.

I wasn’t let down.

I was a little concerned when I realized that her dance career was going to play such a large role in this book, especially after she’d been forced to make a decision in book 2. But after we got started in it, I realized that I loved everything about it. I love dance competition shows, and I love reading about Verity juggling the dance competition and the very dangerous cryptid problem that is occurring in Los Angeles right now.

Better yet was meeting Alice. Finally. I still have a lot of questions about Alice, and I’m sure that there’s quite a lot of mystery that will need to be resolved in the future (or stories about the past, maybe), but I sincerely hope that we get some full-length novels featuring Alice (and the search for her husband, Thomas). Please? Pretty, pretty please. I’ll make brownies and cake and all sorts of yummy food-stuffs for the mice (and anyone else).

I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but I can say that this took my worry about Verity’s two worlds colliding (which happened in books 1 and 2), and amped it up to the nth degree. And the ending. Oh, damn. That ending left me wide-eyed and with goose-bumps.

I can’t wait to see what happens next. There are so many questions that are answered in  this book, but then there are so many new ones that are brought up. I love how intricate and detailed this world is. How many secrets and occurrences are happening with the family. And I’m well and truly hooked.

Now, I just have to wait for the next book. And it’s Antimony’s. I’m a little worried that there’s going to be a lot of roller derby occupying the pages, but I have faith in this author to deliver another stellar story with a main character that I end up adoring.