For the insider, The Witch With No Name brings Hollows to an end with loads of action, death, betrayal, idiocy and heroism.
Master vampires have no sense of other people’s boundaries. They take psychopathy to its extreme. Seriously scary people. Anyone in their right mind would be afraid of them. Perhaps even seasoned demons. Young ones, like Rachel (the only young demon around), need to keep master vampires away from themselves altogether. Often fictional lives do not work out that way.
When a master vampire, like Cormel, wants something, he does not care at all about anything but what he wants. He utilizes anything he thinks will work to get Rachel to do his bidding. Hell, he’ll even use the tools at his disposal even if he doesn’t think they will be effective.
By now Rachel has come to love such an amount of people that Cormel can pick and choose who he wishes to hurt Rachel with. He wants the souls of the undead re-united with their bodies. Whether that is a good thing or not for the vampires, himself even, he cares not. My will be done! So be it! Lord and emperor in one is how he sees himself.
Psychopaths are seriously frightening people and noone wants them in their lives. But at least they are consistent in not caring, in abusing and in being bad for you. The rest of us though. All of us who deal in shades of grey. Man, we are the ones to be worried about. Some of us try to be half-way decent, while others of us tend to lean more towards deviousness and anarchy, but we are all unpredictable. These are the people who will do the most harm to Rachel and her loved ones.
Perhaps people can help it, but I haven’t seen signs of it yet. We do what we think will benefit ourselves and those we care for. It may be detrimental to all the involved parties, but somehow we find ways to justify godawful choices. Some of Trent and Rachel’s enemies are like that. They want what they think is best for themselves and those they wish on their side, even if part of them has to know (it just has to) that they are doing something stupid. Boy is their choice dumb, idiotic, beyond comprehension, yet oh, such a normal thing.
How does a person fight such people? Sometimes you can’t and sometimes you just have to do your best. In Rachel’s case her best can be pretty impressive. While Kim Harrison manages to convince me that Rachel is afraid and all of that, Rachel is way beyond my abilities – not thinking about the magic stuff now. She is simply brave. Brave and loving and dangerous and stupid. But she tries her best to make life better for her loved ones. Since this story is about her and her coterie, she is the one that matters to me. Forget the rest. LET THEM BURN. Or not. Fortunately it just so happens that what is good for Rachel and her people is also good for the rest of the magical population.
And so it ends. Definitely recommended.
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