This book is actually a compendium of novellas by four authors, and, if the title of the book didn't give it away, each story includes some kind of magical tattoo that is important to the plot. The spine labels this book as paranormal romance, which I think is just what they want to call human/fantasy creature love in a post-Twilight world, but it also labels the book as urban fantasy.
Please. There is way better urban fantasy than that.
Maybe it's because I do not like what's happened to the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section of my B&N, but I felt that all of these stories blew. Only one of them isn't tied to some other book series by the author, and all of them include as a focus a crime, specifically a murder, because we all know because of TV is the only thing that happens of interest in our society. Each protagonist is an investigator of some sort, and honestly the plots just bled together in my mind because they were all so similar.
The first story, "Skin Deep" by Karen Chance, is the only one that isn't tied to a book series, but definitely reads like it is. It introduces the idea of magical wards mages use to protect themselves or attack others that appear as tattoos on the mage. But it doesn't really explain any better than that, which sucks, because the whole story is about how the protagonist uses them to track killers of a werewolf and to defeat them. What? The werewolf community is alive and well in this story, and takes on an interesting role that I wish was dwelled more upon. They're political! That's way cooler than some magical war on homeless people that you mention and then never discuss again. Also, I live in Las Vegas. I know that the author lives in Australia and probably just doesn't know, but Las Vegas Boulevard is not called Highway 93 when it's the strip. Especially not right on Tropicana. That would have been solved by a quick Google Map search.
The second story, "Armor of Roses" by Marjorie M. Liu, is tied to her Hunter Kiss series, of which I've read none of. Apparently time travel is okay, though? The protagonist has a old guy die in front of her car, but not before asking her to perform a task. So she goes back in time (?) to when her grandmother was a spy in China during World War II and Jewish kids were being enslaved with magical tattoos. WTF? Also she has pet demons that she can absorb into her skin as armor. What? Huh?
The third story, "Etched in Silver" by Yasmine Galenorn, is actually one that I enjoyed until the end. A half-human agent lives in the fae dimension and has to track down a serial rapist/killer in a secret marketplace. I couldn't help but see Hellboy 2's troll market when they were describing the whole thing. Also it describes her falling in love with a too-handsome stranger. I wanted, all the way until the end, for him to be the bad guy. He wasn't. Fuck that story. :P
The last story, "Human Nature" by Eileen Wilks, was not so bad. The problem was that it was already done in the first story. The protagonist is an FBI agent sleeping with a werewolf whose relative turns up dead. Both stories even call the werewolf community the "Were"! But I liked this one for the same reason I like Laurell K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry series: it doesn't hide magic in urban fantasy, it projects it head-on into society. There are organizations against magic users and the creatures steeped in it, support and revilement from the press, isolated communities, cults, all of that. It's not hidden from the general public, is what I mean. I did have another problem with this story. It's overuse of the word "damn" and all its relatives. There are other cuss words, Ms. Wilks. :(
Like I said, I really didn't like how the novellas all bled together and had the same plot points. They could have at least tried to use a different crime than murder. Seriously. What about arson? Then you could at least have your Mary-Sue investigators pulling children out of burning buildings safely. >:(
2/10
