Archangel's Consort by Nalini Singh

I always thought it would be cool to have wings until I realized that wings would mess with my bra straps. I have enough problems keeping the straps in place and correctly adjusted without adding extra appendages. Ironic, isn't it, that my ongoing struggle to defy gravity through lingerie is my first reason for giving up my daydream about self-propelled gravity-defying flight?

(Oh. Damn. I just typed that out loud. Right. Don't mind me. Nothing to see here but us harmless hyper-imaginative super dorks. Really. Move along. I'll get past my embarrassing confession and get on with the review. Seriously. Move along.)

Nalini Singh's Archangel's Consort gives me a few more reasons to avoid my winged daydreams. First, wings big enough to propel a human aren't just big; they're huge. It's true. Think of all the art you've seen of archangels and seraphs and cherubs. The wings are proportional to the rest of the body which basically means you got one-third to one-half of your body mass to carry behind you. Elevators and other enclosed spaces are not options. You just wouldn't fit.

And while having wings would mean you could just walk off the side of a perfectly good building instead of taking an elevator down, the physics of taking off from a dead start mean only the strongest wings can take you from the ground to the top. There it goes--a perfectly lovely daydream done in by genetics and physics. I hate it when science gets in the way of my fantasies.

The author, though, doesn't allow anything to get in the way of sharing a really compelling story. Archangel's Consort is the third novel of the Guild Hunter series (that also includes two novellas). Elena Deveraux is a born vampire hunter, and she trained with the Guild to learn to track and return vampires who have broken their contracts to their angel masters. She is the best at what she does, and her success brought her to the attention of Raphael, the Archangel of New York, in the first of the series, Angel's Blood. Elena and Raphael have been together ever since, trying to keep peace and order in a world run by angels who create vampires from select humans in their domains.

Archangel's Consort contains more of what made me first love the series--sneaky political intrigue, a well-crafted mythology, bad guys that get caught, and good old-fashioned love. I highly recommend the Guild Hunter series and Singh's other series, eight Psy/Changeling books and three novellas.

For more plot details, check out what Amazon says about Archangel's Consort.