One Fell Sweep – Ilona Andrews

In the third book of this series, Dina gets a message from her sister Maud. Last anyone knew, Maud was with her vampire husband out somewhere in the wider universe, and Dina’s shocked to get a request for rescue from her. She calls in some favors from her sometime ally Arland, Marshall of one of the vampire houses, and they find Maud and her daughter Helen on a vampire prison planet, where they’d been exiled after her husband had made some very bad decisions, and gotten them exiled from his house. He’s dead now.

In the meantime, a race called the Hiru come to Dina and her inn for help. Another race called the Draziri have started a holy war against them, and they need sanctuary to gather the help that is the last hope of their race. The Draziri play dirty, and it’s all Dina can do to keep the inn safe, but the Hiru have offered her the chance to find information on her missing parents.

And finally, we have the problem of the werewolf Sean, who’s home now, but pretty much only made it home from a mercenary job because the thought of Dina kept him going, so she’ll need to figure out how she feels about that, and what that means.

This story definitely had an air of pushing larger arcs along, but it had some satisfying smaller arcs to go with it. Maud meets Arland was great, and the story of the Hiru ends up being way more than you first think it is. Really enjoyable series – I’m a bit bummed I have to wait for the next one to come out.