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Review: Omens by Kelley Armstrong

Summary

Twenty-four-year-old Olivia Taylor Jones has the perfect life. The only daughter of a wealthy, prominent Chicago family, she has an Ivy League education, pursues volunteerism and philanthropy, and is engaged to a handsome young tech firm CEO with political ambitions.

But Olivia’s world is shattered when she learns that she’s adopted. Her real parents? Todd and Pamela Larsen, notorious serial killers serving a life sentence. When the news brings a maelstrom of unwanted publicity to her adopted family and fiancé, Olivia decides to find out the truth about the Larsens.

Olivia ends up in the small town of Cainsville, Illinois, an old and cloistered community that takes a particular interest in both Olivia and her efforts to uncover her birth parents’ past.

Aided by her mother’s former lawyer, Gabriel Walsh, Olivia focuses on the Larsens’ last crime, the one her birth mother swears will prove their innocence. But as she and Gabriel start investigating the case, Olivia finds herself drawing on abilities that have remained hidden since her childhood, gifts that make her both a valuable addition to Cainsville and deeply vulnerable to unknown enemies. Because there are darker secrets behind her new home, and powers lurking in the shadows that have their own plans for her.

My thoughts

And here we go again. Kelley Armstrong makes me love yet another book. She always chooses such simple and well known topics but creates such an interesting story around that so that I’m hooked right from the beginning.
I’ve read many books about serial killers, that’s nothing new for me. A woman who gets to know she is adopted and actually the daughter of serial killers? Awesome concept but still nothing new to me here. What made me fall in love with this book is its combination of that with paranormal aspects and all these secrets concerning these paranormal aspects. All throughout the book I was asking myself what’s going on over and over again and was craving new details about this strange world of Cainsville.
With Cainsville as the main setting I sometimes felt like home. This small town community really has its charm and houses such unique and interesting characters that I wouldn’t mind living there even if I probably wouldn’t be welcome. We get to know a lot about this town and its residents but it still wasn’t enough for my taste. And I don’t mean that the story lacked details but that I liked these characters so much it would never have been enough. Hence I can’t wait for the next book to come out and get to know more.

As someone who doesn’t believe in omens I was surprised how interested I was in all these facts about them. I was as skeptic as Olivia herself. As a reader you are ahead of Olivia by reading from other POV’s and you know there is more to them but I could always relate to Olivia in not believing in them. By providing multiple POV’s we know there is something going on in the background Olivia doesn’t know about. But the facts we get from those are only superficial. There are still way to many questions unanswered to get the bigger picture. And this is exactly what kept me reading. I just couldn’t put it down. I had to know what’s going on. I wanted it to spill all its secrets at once and enjoyed being in the unknown at the same time.

It’s not only these mysterious secrets that kept me reading. I wouldn’t call it fast paced and action packed but it sure does have its gripping moments that kept me fearing for the safety of some characters. From experience I know that Kelley Armstrong doesn’t even need an action packed plot to make me love the story. It’s mostly her characters that I fall for. Olivia is someone I liked right away and I could understand her actions regarding the news about her birth parents. And there is this one guy. Kelley Armstrong always makes me fall all over that one guy who is not even handsome, who no one seems to like. There is always something about these guys that makes me like them and crave every moment with them. And in this story this guy brings along some funny conversations because he is so different from Olivia and they always find something to argue about.

When picking up a book by Kelley Armstrong I know I will get a story I’ll like or even love. I haven’t read a single book written by her that disappointed me. I’m grateful for yet another series that I can enjoy and that will keep me up late because I’m unable to stop reading. I wish I could already get my hands on the second book in the series and get to know more about this unique town Cainsville and these extraordinary characters.

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  • I wanted to read Omens when it first came out but decided not to cause most of the readers said it was more thriller-ish than a urban fantasy novel and back then I was looking for an UF fix. You changed my mind. I think I’ll give this one a try next year.

  • I need help! I just got the second book of the series, and I’ve read about one page and have no idea what is going on. For the life of me, I can’t remember much of what happened in the first book, Omens. Can anyone give me a condensed summary, including what happened at the end? I can’t find any answers on the internet and I’m going nuts!

    • uuuh, sorry. I don’t remember much either. I think I need to reread the first one before I start the second.

Dec 07, 2013