The first book in Jayne Faith’s Ella Grey series starts off pretty good, almost like a combination of Greywalker and Kate Daniels. Sadly, it spontaneously combusts about halfway through when the protagonist starts to think of herself as an infiltration expert despite having little magic power and no related skills. Wasn’t a huge fan of her self-destructive obsessions with both her missing brother and the random girl she just met either.
K.F. Breene’s Born in Fire, by contrast, starts out terrible. So terrible I seriously considered dropping it a mere 3 pages in. But I’ve forced myself through worse and pressed on to be rewarded by… a few surprisingly amusing interactions and an uncommon approach to depicting vampires. So despite the near-constant stream of cringe pouring out the protagonist I didn’t end up hating it. Well, at least not until the final chapter which gets real weird in a number of ways.
Needless to say, I highly doubt I’ll be following either of these series any further.