Cheyenne McCray’s Night Tracker Series Debut

I’d heard of Cheyenne McCray, but not having read anything of hers, I thought Demons Not Included, the first book in her new Night Trackers series would be a good introduction. I was looking for a quick, intriguing paranormal romance fix, and Elvin escapades seemed a nice break from the vamps and werewolves I’ve been reading about lately.

The Premise

In Demons Not Included, half-human, half-Drow (Dark Elf) Nix has left the Drow underworld to live in NYC as a PI-by-day (when she looks human), Tracker-by-night (when she looks Drow). Things were going great until demons started appearing in the city, killing paranormal beings and in-the-know members of NYPD known as liaisons. And then they went even worse when Trackers started dying. Nix, along with her human PI partner, love-interest human cop friend, and the other Trackers have to defeat the demons and their evil plans before all Hell breaks loose.

The Execution

I’m not a fan of McCray’s writing style in this book. I lost count of the number of times Nix mentions her XPhone (plain ol’ Blackberry-type cell). After the first few times, every time I read a passage about the damn thing, I was suddenly jarred out of the Night Tracker Otherworld and into “This is a professional writer? Really?” world. That, in association with “blah blah blah because of my Drow half” every other page or so really turned what I thought would be a quick, intriguing read into just a quick read that I looked forward to the end of.

For a paranormal romance, Demons Not Included was also missing most of the romance part of the equation as well. Rather than developing the relationship between Nix and Adam Boyd, a cop who is familiar with the existence of paranormals, but is hazy on what exactly Nix is, McCray drops us in medias res, straight to the “I like him, he likes me, but I’m too scared of him running away when he finds out I’m half-Drow, ’cause I was burned by a past lover” part. Add Boyd’s lack of character development to that, and it was no surprise when they hopped in the sack after a scare on her life and he hed no reservations at all when she went Drow-looking at Sunset, only to have a wrench thrown in. The twist: mere days before finally consummating their mutual attraction, Nix had needed some post-friend’s-murder, life-affirming therapy of the skin-to-skin variety and had gone to her boss/mentor/sometimes-lover Rodán—which Boyd finds out and has issues dealing with. The conclusion? Seems we have to wait for book 2—Werewolves Not Allowed, slated for early 2010.

Will I Read Book 2?

Short answer—well, yeah. Is it going to jump the the top of my list on release day? Probably not. I hate stopping in the middle of a series, and McCray’s writing didn’t bother me so much that I’d abandon it. The character development for Nix and her human PI partner Olivia was good, and there were plenty of not-so-subtle “Rodán seems to like her a lot more than she thinks he does” hints that make me quite curious about where the Nix-Boyd-Rodán conflict is headed. If McCray can cut down on the legion references to the XPhone, I might even find myself enjoying the whole book without being snapped back to reality via irritation. My hopes for that are actually somewhat high, after reading the preview of the first book in her other new series, The First Sin: A Lexi Steele Novel (Feb 2009). It may just be this book, and not McCray’s writing as a whole that I disliked. So, look for my thoughts on Werewolves Not Allowed sometime after the book is released in 2010. And stay tuned for a Lexi Steele review in the coming months. Book 2 of that series, The Second Betrayal, comes out in August.