Indebted by Amy A. Bartol

Title: Indebted
Series: Premonition
Author: Amy A. Bartol
Previous Books in Series: Inescapable, Intuition
Rating: 4.5 stars
Length: 7520 Kindle units (includes preview for next book in series)

Refresher: This is the one about Evie, Reed, and Russell. If you read the prior two books, you’ll remember that it’s super-awesome except for the transcribed accents and continuous endorsement of benevolent sexism.

I was leafing through new books on Amazon last week, not expecting to find anything, since I check it every day. But then, on about my fourth page of recommendations, I found that Indebted was out, and I was super-excited. So I immediately downloaded it and reminded myself to add Amy Bartol’s blog to list of sites to stalk for release dates.

So to get the burning questions out of the way first: Yes, the accents are still transcribed. The Gancanagh are still around and talking in Celtic accents that closely resemble lolspeak. And Russell is still transcribing his accent in his narration. More importantly, Russell still has narration, which has us Reed fans concerned that the soulmate is going to win out over the angel. (I am sufficiently scared that the first thing I had to do when I got the book was check the end to make sure Reed doesn’t die. And I’m not going to tell you whether I was satisfied or not, cuz that would be a spoiler.) On the bright side, there are fewer Russell chapters in Indebted than there were in Intuition, and they describe scenes where Evie isn’t present, so they serve a purpose.

We do get a few more pieces about the overall plot – including which side Evie’s father is from – but I have to confess to being largely unsatisfied as far as story development is concerned. Evie spends the majority of Indebted with the Gancanagh. Fascinating as her development of Stockholm Syndrome is – and, really, it’s only moderately interesting – I feel like we really didn’t make too much more progress in this domain, certainly not enough to warrant a book of this length. And the whole time, I’m pretty much thinking that I don’t WANT to be reading about Evie and the Gancanagh. I want to read about Evie and her angel friends dealing with angel politics, finding out more about Evie’s role in the universe, and smiting the new enemies that come up. Russell can even tag along if he has to, but, really, I’d rather leave Brennus out of it.

Like the previous novels in the series, Indebted is eminently readable. But I did not find myself nearly as sucked in as I did with the first two novels, and I’m concerned the shine is starting to wear off the series. But with any luck, Book #4 will get us back on the track of the uber-plot.

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