Title: Spirit (Elemental #3)
Author: Brigid Kemmerer
Published: May, 2013 by Kensington
Pages: 301
Rating:  
Purchase: The Book Depository

With power comes enemies. Lots of them.

Hunter Garrity just wants to be left alone. He’s learned the hard way that his unusual abilities come at a price. And he can’t seem to afford any allies.

He’s up to his neck in hostiles. His grandfather, spoiling for a fight. The Merrick brothers, who think he ratted them out. Calla, the scheming psycho who wants to use him as bait.

Then there’s Kate Sullivan, the new girl at school. She’s not hostile. She’s bold. Funny. Hot. But she’s got an agenda, too.

With supposedly secret powers rippling to the surface everywhere around him, Hunter knows something ugly is about to go down. But finding out what means he’ll have to find someone he can trust…

Final Thoughts:
Any doubts I had about this series are gone. Hunter hooked me right back in, and he wasn’t even one of the brothers. His perspective wasn’t one that I expected to enjoy, him being one of the characters I didn’t particularly enjoy in Spark. I guess I just didn’t know him well enough. He was easily more likeable than Gabriel, leading me to fly through this book picking it up at every chance I got. I think a main drawcard was the addition of Kate. She wasn’t the standard, plain-Jane love interest. She was an assassin. When I read that, I knew this book was going to be different.

I don’t think any of the characters in the series have had the perfect family, so I should be used to it when things at home aren’t peachy, but I’m still finding myself thrown at how bad things can be for these people. Like abusive bad…neglect, physical altercations, you name it. It does the job and gets you feeling for these guys. I just wanted someone to hug Hunter and tell him they were there for him. There was his dog, Casper, but I think that just made his situation seem worse—another life depending on him when he could barely take care of himself.

Assassin girl, Kate, one of the Guides sent to kill the Merrick brothers—I loved her character. She had plenty of…confidence, and her presence actually progressed the plot rather than serving as a romantic detour like Layne did in the last book. Here, I felt torn between whether to trust her and root for the relationship building between the two of them, or tell Hunter to turn her in. It’s so much more enjoyable when the internal warring of the characters affects not only them but you as well.

Kate wasn’t the only source of conflict, with firestarter, Calla, making a return. I can honestly say that I hated her character—and that was a great thing. I have this love/hate relationship with angst, but the love side always seems to win out, otherwise I wouldn’t keep putting myself through countless eps of The Bold and the Beautiful. You know there’s a fall coming for the villain, and that’s the best part—watching them get theirs—so when someone can make me despise them so quickly, and to such an extent, yeah, I hate them, but I love it too.

Even though Hunter takes the forefront, I probably should mention that the Merrick brothers do make an appearance. They actually took up more of the page time here than in Spark. Michael probably gets the most page time beyond that of the book’s main pairing, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. He has really come into his own as a parent and taken to life with a girlfriend, but I have this urge to see what’s actually going on in that head of his.

Recommendation:
If you’re on the fence about continuing the series, keep going, this one really turned things around for me.