Title: Angel’s Flight
Author: Nalini Singh
Release: February 28, 2012
Genre: Urban Vampire

Four novellas filled with angels of awesome and dangerous beauty, vampires with charm and sly ruthlessness, and a guild of hunters who are all too human. This is the world that Singh has built so successfully you will never want to leave. In Angel’s Flight, angels run everything, and vampires wield power but not without a cost. For angels will choose amongst them who will gain near-immortality, and when granted, it will cost them one hundred years of servitude to the angels. When a vampire runs rogue from this responsibility, that is when the Hunters Guild is called in, to bring the errant vampire to earth and to the angel they have wronged. It is a tricky and often dangerous job, but coveted by many.

The stories tell the tales of three sets of characters within this world, all with back stories of love, lust and danger. Angel’s Pawn brings us the cajun vampire charmer Janvier, who plays a new role of assisting Guild Hunter Ashwini instead of his usual one of hunted. Together they must bring in an errant vampire to the angel of Atlanta, and deal with the heat that rises between them along the way.

The second novella, Angel’s Judgment, brings Sara into the spotlight. In the novels from the series she is usually a background character, but here we see her as the new Guild Director and working a case of a vampire killer on the loose with the Guild’s own “Slayer” Deacon. Soon the two become more than partners, as the heat builds and the danger grows.

In Angel’s Wolf we meet the vampire Noel, recovering from a savage beating and struggling to regain some sense of emotional balance. When he is sent to the angel Nimra to help find out who is trying to kill her, he unexpectedly finds an angel with a fierce reputation and yet gentleness beneath that could be his road to healing. So many of the angels in this series are awesome creatures of unearthly power and might –  this story is actually a welcome view into the other side of the angels.

Although the other three stories are actually reprints from other books, brought together here for the first time, the final story, Angels Dance is a totally new one. I love it when any series that deals with long lived creatures like this decide to take us into the past and that is just what this story does. We are taken back 400 years, to witness the birth of a love affair between the wing-wounded Jessamy and Galen. He sees Jess as the isolated and lonely woman she is, and takes her soaring in more ways than one. It is a lovely tale of romance and longing, and the mysteries they solve together as angels are a great foil for this relationship to be grown.

Even if you have never read the series, these novellas are a great introduction to a cast of characters and a world so well-conceived you will be searching out the rest of the series. Angels Flight is the perfect set of stories to take you out of your world and into one you will want to return to again and again.