As half-Fae go, Bryce Quinlan seems fairly normal. She works as an assistant at a gallery, and if some of her errands are a little weird, well, so are most things in gritty Crescent City (also known as Lunathion), where otter messengers run side by side with werewolves, witches, angels (fallen and otherwise), vampires, and other supernatural beings.
Bryce works during the day and goes out with her friends at night—friends that include Danika, the leader of a werewolf pack; Fury, whose work is mysterious; and Juniper, a ballerina faun. She dates; she rebuffs the interest of one of Danika’s wolf-bros; she’s in her early twenties and she mostly does what she wants.
Until Danika and her entire pack are gruesomely murdered.
House of Earth and Blood is Sarah J. Maas’s first venture into fiction for grown adults, not young adults, but if you were expecting that to mean more sexytimes, you will be disappointed. Mostly it means that the heroine has a job and some responsibilities, that the violence is more detailed, and that everyone swears a lot more than in the Throne of Glass or A Court of Thorns and Roses series.
