Title Werehunter Series --- Author Mercedes Lackey Cover Art --- Publisher Baen - 1999 First Printing Baen - 1999 Category Anthology Warnings Paedophilia Main Characters See below Main Elements Science fiction, A.I., shapeshifters, witches, vampires, and more

A short story collection, companion volume to Fiddler Fair. A woman who can change into a leopard is pursued by a hunter who is more than human. Occult detective Diana Tregarde trails a very unusual vampire. Four SKitty stories, and more!

• Werehunter
• SKitty
• A Tail of Two SKitties
• SCat
• A Better Mousetrap
• The Last of the Season
• Satanic, Versus
• Nightside
• Wet Wings
• Stolen Silver
• Roadkill
• Operation Desert Fox
• Grey
• Grey's Ghost

Werehunter takes place in Andre Norton's Witchworld, which I'm not familiar with so I can't comment on it's quality as a story in that universe, but as a portal story where a woman from our world with nothing to lose finds herself in another one, with the ability to shapeshift, was still an interesting read. Lackey describes the feeling of being able to take another form quite well.

The next four are Skitty tales. See, even when we go to space we'll still have vermin on our ships and will be in need of shipcats, but cats need a little genetic engineering help so that they can thrive in space, like the ability to handle no gravity, to be more intelligent, and to have raccoon hands to manipulate things on the ship. And SKitty seems to have an extra power of telepathy that seemed to be a random quirk but that works just fine for Dick White, SKitty's handler (in fact her name is Dick White's Kitty, or Dick's Kitty, or just SKitty). Cats always have an amusing aloofness to them and it seems you can't engineer that out of them. These were my favorite stories of the collection, and while I don't think would work as full length novels, I wouldn't mind being able to read even more SKitty stories.

The Last of the Season is a disturbing tale of a paedophile who gets what he deserves, but told from his point of view it is quite horrifying. It's kind of a reverse horror story where its the villain that is attacked by the scary demon monster thing. It is a very uncomfortable read but maybe that's what made it actually kind of good.

The next two are Diana Tregarde stories, shes a practicing witch that works as a romance writer to pay the bills. I felt the opposite about these stories than I did about the SKitty ones, they had potential, but probably needed to be novels. A kind of standard urban fantasy with a vampire sidekick we kind of got dumped into Diana's world without any preamble...maybe there are other stories/novels out there so we are expected to be familiar with Diana. And really, when the villain pulls out a wooden weapon that could kill Andre the vampire, he steps aside and lets human Diana get her butt kicked until she manages to get rid of said piece of wood...really? I mean sure he could be killed by wood, but she could be killed by wood and just about everything else the villain could throw her way. You'd think a vampire would still be able to fight even if there is some risk to him!! That was ridiculously lame.

Wet Wings tells of a world where not just magic, but any originality has been outlawed (frankly, if you look at what people complain about these days, you'd think we were headed in just this direction, it's chilling actually). Katherine is a witch, sending butterflies out into the world to encourage people to be different, to dream, to imagine, to create. A beautiful story.

Stolen Silver is a Valdemar story. I've always intended to read it but haven't gotten around to it yet. Can't say if it's a good addition to the story, and interesting that the main character is from a land at war with Valdemar and is thus terrified of the "witchery" and those creepy companions. Though I'd never read Valdemar before, let's just say a pure white stallion named Silver was kind of a ginormous hint as to where the story was going to end though!

Roadkill was one of those "what if" stories, where you drive along the highway and notice a piece of paper skitter by as if it were alive...what if, it really is alive?

Operation Desert Fox ties into Keith Laumer's Bolo series, a world where tanks are given artificial intelligence. Here, we have a soldier, a black man named Sigfried O'Hannigan and a tank that calls itself Rommel. Sigfried, being a fan of the real Rommel's military tactics is the perfect person to be paired up with the tank which was otherwise pending decomission. Sure, they were sent out almost as a joke to an agrarian world to protect it (from what, no one could say), but it never hurts to be prepared! I never thought I'd grow fond of a tank before.

Grey and Grey's Ghost are a pair of stories about a couple of girls in a boarding school in Victorian England. Sarah was born in Africa but was sent back for fears the hot weather would harm her health (like England's smog was a great thing). Nan lived on the streets. But the two formed a friendship, and it was discovered that they both had special talents, an ability to tell if someone is lying, to predict playing cards and other psychic skills. And of course Grey, Sarah's parrot that seems to be more than she appears.

On the whole, this was a pretty solid anthology, and that's a pretty rare thing, often a good chunk of an anthology is either incomprehensible (to fancy literary) or just falls flat. But I enjoyed all these stories, several of which I wouldn't mind reading more (the Skitty ones of course, though there are just the four, but there is a lot more Valdemar and Bolo out there).