Think you have weekend plans?WRONG.
Here’s why your weekend plans now involve Julie Hutchings’ “Running Away.”
Once upon a time, I was all about Charlaine Harris’ “True Blood” books. I’d seen Harris talk while covering Comic-Con, and she was funny and nice, so I read the first few of her books.
They were fun. I read a few books, and then I stopped, and that was it.
A while back, I got to know Julie Hutchings on Twitter, saw she’d written a supernatural action-romance along the same lines, “Running Home.” “Running Home” was fun, like Harris’ books, but Eliza Morgan affected me in a way Sookie Stackhouse didn’t.
Eliza is the girl I hung out with in college, the girl you always called because she brought the room to life. When the book ended, I wanted to spend more time not just finding out what happened to her, but *with* her.
I wanted more.
Well, now there’s more. And here’s what “Running Away” is all about.
Eliza Morgan is desperate to escape the horrors of her mortal life and understand why death follows her, leaving only one man, Nicholas French, in its wake. He’s the one she loves, the one she resents, and the one fated to make her legendary among the Shinigami– an ancient order of vampires with a “heroic” duty to kill. He’s also decaying before her eyes, and it’s her fault.
On the ghostlike mountaintop in Japan that the vampires consider home, Eliza will be guided by the all-powerful Master for her transition to Shinigami death god. When Eliza discovers that sacrificing her destiny will save Nicholas, she’s not afraid to defy fate and make it so—even when Nicholas’s salvation kills her slowly with torturous, puzzle-piece visions that beg her to solve them. Both Nicholas and his beloved Master fight her on veering from the path to immortality, but Eliza won’t be talked out of her plan, even if it drives the wedge between Nicholas and her deeper.
Allying with the fiery rebel, Kieran, who does what he wants and encourages her to do the same, and a mysterious deity that only she can see, Eliza must forge her own path through a maze of ancient traditions and rivalries, shameful secrets and dark betrayals to take back the choices denied her and the Shinigami who see her as their savior. To uncover the truth and save her loved ones, Eliza will stop at nothing, including war with fate itself.
Go get “Running Away” now. I command it.
