Captive

While this review is for Captive, the sixth installment of R. N. Jayne's Master series, it's impossible not to mention the entire line as a whole. Just as it's impossible to understand what's really going on in this one if you haven't read what's come before. I do recommend the investment of time if your guilty pleasure includes dark fantasy and vampires acting like the true apex predators they were first whispered to be. Just expect there to be quite a bit of emphasis placed on the guilty part of that pleasure with this series.

Justus, the vampire “Master” that most closely operates as the villain, is anything but just. Old, powerful, and utterly depraved, please pay attention to the warnings the author includes with every novel. Explicit sexual assault, gory violence, and drug abuse are all recurring themes. What isn't listed though, is that there is also quite a bit of psychological abuse as well. Not all puppet-masters need physical strings to do the controlling.

If those warnings don't put you off, what you get is a well-crafted tale that gets largely stronger from beginning to end. The first few novels jump back and forth from chapter to chapter, past to present which isn't a personal preference of mine. But even with that, I felt the overall works were cohesive. Character arcs, especially two in particular, are beautifully done. Despite the narrative sometimes skirting close to my own limits, I hope to read the conclusion in the next installment just because of those two characters.

Every series has a few dips and rises in quality, especially one that's six books in. The first was the rockiest in my opinion, but I still would have considered it worth reading even without it being the series starter. In fact, I'd rank all of the Master series at that level or higher` with Captive being the strongest so far.The writing is beautiful and descriptive, making some of the more depraved content that much more so. Only a few issues with one character and a spattering of errors kept this from being a must read for me.