#Review - Cursed by Fire by Danielle Annett #Fantasy

Series: Blood & Magic # 1
Format: Kindle, 235 pages
Release Date: December 1, 2020
Publisher: Coffee and Characters
Source: Amazon
Genre: Dark Fantasy

Blood is going to spill …
It won't be mine.

Someone is feeding the flames, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. The victims are innocents, chosen to pit the shifter Pack and the vampire Coven against one another.

If war breaks out, humanity won’t survive.

But controlling fire is my thing, and I won’t let that happen.
I’m a mercenary, but this is about so much more than money. It’s my city and someone is threatening it. I won’t stop until I find them.

When the good guys start to look more like villains, I have no choice but to question everything I knew, including the people I thought I could trust.

It turns out the humans might not be as helpless as they seem, and I'm in more danger than I realized.

Cursed by Fire, by author Danielle Annett, is the first installment in the authors Blood and Magic series. In this world, it has been 6 years since the Awakening when all things that went bump in the night came out. That includes vampires, shifters, mages, witches, and many more. Humans are no longer at the top of the food chain. The protagonist of this series is Aria Naveed currently in Spokane, Washington working as a mercenary. She's also a Psyker - human born with pyrokinetic abilities aka pyrokinesis.  

After a case involving a 7 years old seems to end up as a cold case, Aria is devastated she couldn't find who was responsible. Then the alpha of the local shifter community, Declan Valkenaar, approaches Aria and her partner Mike. It seems as though what appeared to be the murder of a human child, is actually the murder of a shifter from the Pacific Northwest Pack. Let me know if you have heard this before. Shifters in this book have been infected by a virus called Lyc-V. It spreads by blood to blood contact unlike vampires who actually have to bite you. There are packs in this book called Clan Cat, Clan Wolf, Clan Feloidea (hyenas), Clan Muridea (rodents), Clan Canidea (foxes) and Clan Big (bears). 

Aria ends up working with a man named James who is also a shifter and the packs hunter aka enforcer. If that’s not enough, Aria has a stalker named Inarus who evokes something in her each time they collide, he can do things Aria has never seen. Can she trust him? Why is he following her? To make matters worse, it seems that there is also a human run group that truly hates the supernaturals and would love to see them eliminated. Strangely enough, it seems that this rift may also be causing the pack and vampires to grow closer to a war which humans would lose badly.

So, do I think this was ripped off from other authors? Close. The idea behind the pack, as well as the vampires was definitely similar to another well known series. It's not plagiarized in that there are no copying and pasting of parts of the Kate Daniels series. There are also other differences like whether or not we will get the truth from the author about what really happened to her parents and why. So, would this book be considered fan fiction? I would have to read the sequel to find out and I have plenty of others books to get through first.