Imagine a world that doesn’t know its own rules. No cell phones. No Internet. No stock market. No money. No legal system. A third of the world’s population wiped out in a single night and the count rising by millions every day. The human race is an endangered species.” So starts Iced, the first book in Karen Marie Moning’s Dani O’Malley trilogy. This supernatural contemporary fantasy is a follow-up to the bestselling Fever series and begins chronologically after the Fever series’ final book, Shadowfever. However, unlike the Fever series, the main characters of this novel are 14-year-old Dani “Mega” O’Malley (a girl with superhuman strength and speed), Ryodan (owner of Chester’s nightclub), and Christian MacKeltar (druid turning fae).
Since the fall of the wall separating the fae and human worlds, Dublin has become a war zone where humans are preyed upon by a myriad of dark fae. Dani O’Malley with her Sword of Light has become one of the few humans with the ability to fight back the fae. But now there is a new presence in Dublin and it is icing (and killing) everything that it touches. Who can Dani trust to help her defend her precious city? Alliances are made and broken and the young teenager will struggle to discover who is friend and who is foe. Readers, like me, who voraciously read through the five Fever books, will quickly become entangled in this new series. The perspective from a teen’s point of view gives the series a fresh feel. I didn’t ever get the sense that I was simply reading a regurgitated version of the original Fever series. You will, however, get to the end of Iced and be wondering how soon until the second Dani O’Malley book will be released. According to the publisher, Burned is scheduled for April 2014!