Shapeshifted by Cassie Alexander

 

Nurse Edie Spence is once again called upon to save a life...and this time, it's personal. Can her new community of zombies, vampires, and shapeshifters come to her rescue when she needs them most?

When Edie was fired from her paranormal nursing job at County Hospital, her whole world came crashing down. Now she is once again shaken to her core. Her mother is deathly ill and there’s only one thing that will save her: vampire blood. But with the paranormal community shunning Edie, where can she find it…without losing her own life in the process?

Edie hopes to procure it at her new job at the clinic across town, where the forces of evil loom large. Vampire gang wars are rampant. Old underground enemies are rising to the surface. And Eide’s zombie ex-boyfriend has arrived at the scene—but is he the same man he used to be? And what should she make of the enigmatic doctor with whom she shares an unexpected connection? She’ll have to figure it out soon, because all hell is about to break loose—literally—and time is running out…

 

Shapeshifted (Edie Spence, book three) by Cassie Alexander

Start date: November 17, 2021

End date: November 19, 2021

Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 stars

Trigger warning: gang violence

Each novel gets better as the series progresses.

Shapeshifted picks up a little bit after Moonshifted left off. After Edie was shunned, she lost her job at County Hospital, meaning the protection that the Shadows gave to Jake, her brother, was gone. He’s back on drugs, and Edie is back to worrying if he’ll overdose and die in a ditch somewhere. She’s working overnights at a sleep clinic now. Not only would her previous job have no record of her working there (so Edie has a gap in her résumé), but none of her coworkers remember her either (so no current references). When Edie runs into her former coworker Gina in town, it becomes obvious the Shadows wiped her memory.

“You don’t remember me?”

She frowned deeply. “No. Should I?”

I blinked. Oh, no. I’d told the Shadows I didn’t want them to change my memories—maybe instead they’d changed everyone else’s?

“I’m sorry—I must have you confused with someone else,” I said. It wasn’t worth Gina wondering who the Shadows had stolen away from her for the rest of her day. I’d been the one to choose remembering. I didn’t think she would have chosen to forget. (Alexander 111)

Nightshifted by Cassie Alexander

 

Welcome to the secret wing of County Hospital—where vampires get transfusions, werewolves have silver allergies, and one nurse is in way over her head…

Nursing school prepared Edie Spence for a lot of things. Burn victims? No problem. Severed limbs? Piece of cake. Vampires? No way in hell. But as the newest nurse on Y4, the secret ward hidden in the bowels of County Hospital, Edie has her hands full with every paranormal patient you can imagine—from vamps and were-things to zombies and beyond…

Edie’s just trying to learn the ropes so she can get through her latest shift unscathed. But when a vampire servant turns to dust under her watch, all hell breaks loose. Now she’s haunted by the man’s dying words—Save Anna—and before she knows it, she’s on a mission to rescue some poor girl from the undead. Which involves crashing a vampire den, falling for a zombie, and fighting for her soul. Grey’s Anatomy was never like this…

Nightshifted (Edie Spence, book one) by Cassie Alexander

Start date: August 3, 2021

End date: August 4, 2021

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars

Content warning: child abuse, sex, offensive language

Edith “Edie” Spence is a newly minted registered nurse working at Providence General Hospital. After her brother, Jake, overdoses one too many times on heroin, Edie is offered an extraordinary deal from a mysterious stranger: if she works for County Hospital on Floor Y4, the powers that be will make sure Jake stays clean. Without fully understanding what she’s agreeing to, Edie signs the paperwork. That’s when her life goes sideways—Y4 isn’t any old floor at County. It’s where firefighting zombies recuperate, syphilitic dragons get treatment, and vampire baby showers are performed.

Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton

No one knows the dark desires of the soul better than #1 New York Times bestselling author Laurell K. Hamilton. In Guilty Pleasures, she introduces Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. Anita's small, dark, and dangerous. But when the city's most powerful vampire comes to her for help, Anita is faced with her greatest fear--a man capable of arousing in her a hunger strong enough to match his own...

"Why should it surprise me that I was alive?...

There on the right side of my neck was the real thing...

Tiny, diminutive fang marks. Nikolaos [had] contaminated me...

I bet she thought I'd be scared of her. She was right on that.

But I spend most of my waking hours confronting and destroying things that I fear. A thousand-year-old master vampire was a tall order, but a girl's got to have a goal."

Guilty Pleasures (Anita Blake, book one) by Laurell K. Hamilton

Start date: December 18, 2014

End state: December 19, 2014

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Content warning: torture, sexual violence

The only reason the Anita Blake series made it on my reading challenge list was because of the rumors I had heard about the books. I’ve always been told that Laurell K. Hamilton writes graphic, detailed sex scenes. I was embarrassed the first time I ever read a story in which characters engaged in sexual acts, but I’ve come a long way since then. Now I love a well described sexual encounter and pray for them in the novels in which the characters have sizzling chemistry. I put the first book in the Anita Blake series on my list so I could try out the series to see if I liked it. After finishing the entire Hush, Hush series within the past three days (you heard read me right—I binged), I needed a satisfying sex scene to alleviate all that tension so I turned to the author I heard so much about. I won’t ruin the Hush, Hush series for anyone but if you’re looking for something steamy, you might want to look away from young adult novels. Silly me for not accounting for the target audience in my expectations of the books. Never again!