Title: Heat Stroke
Series: Weather Warden Book 2
Author(s): Rachel Caine
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publisher/Year: Roc/2004

Synopsis:  Accused of murder, Weather Warden Joanne Baldwin was chased across the country—and killed—by a team charged with hunting down rogue Wardens.

Five days later, Joanne had a lovely funeral and was posthumously cleared of all charges. Her human life was over, but she had been reborn in Djinnhood. Now, until she masters her enhanced powers, Joanne must try to avoid being "claimed" by a human. But when a hazard that only a Djinn could sense infiltrates Earth's atmosphere, Joanne must somehow convince someone to do something about it—or the forecast will be deadly. So who said being all-powerful was going to be easy?

Rating:

Review:  If these things keep happening to Joanne I may have to start seeing who gets beat up almost to death more often her or Kate Daniels. So we left Joanne having been informed that she's now a Djinn--which I find highly suspect and convenient that it could happen. Actually given the current trend to endings in this series I'm wondering about the convenient things that continually happen to Joanne.

Good news is that just 'cause she's technically dead as a mortal it doesn't mean we don't get to see her friends, associates or David's abs anymore. The bad news is that we do get to sit through a little bit of a 'Oops! New Djinn didn't know I could do that!' training mode.

Things heat up (get it?) pretty quickly for Joanne and David as David tries to teach Joanne how NOT to get herself claimed, they both try to figure out who's messing around in the Oversight so horribly, old friends (flames?) appear to knock their relationship around a bit and oh yeah Joanne ends up pulling a 'I Dream of Genie' bit for a little while.

While some of the book felt a little repetitious--I understand what the Weather Wardens do, I understand just how powerful Lewis is, yes we know the Wardens 'killed' you Joanne--a whole bunch of other stuff was intriguing and new. As Joanne learned about being a Djinn, which is a lot of work for no pay, we also got to see how David operates and some of his motivations. Learned more about what its like for a Djinn to be 'claimed' and the vast amount of power differences between the claimed and the free.

And for fun Joanne laments her lack of speedy cars. Which is cute.

Honestly speaking I kind of questioned the long term goals of David and Joanne; if Yvette, Kevin and Jonathan hadn't shown up I'm not entirely certain this would have been an interesting enough novel just with the two of them. They're not quite formed yet in some ways--comparatively speaking Joanne has only known David for about two weeks, half of which she's laid injured, out cold or being misled about his identity.

The end had me biting my lip in both fascination and irritation. I was fascinated because after a long(ish) speech by David to Jonathan about what it feels like to be 'claimed' things seem to take a different path. Irritated because it had such an obvious hook to make the reader want to read the third book that I was ready to toss it across the room. If I didn't HAVE the next three books in the series I likely WOULD have thrown it across the room.

Still with CHILL FACTOR waiting on my shelf, and the next Morganville Vampires book not due out for a few months yet, I have time to digest a bit. This isn't a terribly deep series or thought-provoking one, but its a pleasant piece of fluff to entertain one for an evening or afternoon.


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