The scene was at an airport: I was traveling on business and bored out of my mind. Looking forward to four more hours of flight, something had to distract me. So I looked at the trashy novel section of a newsstand. Amid the dangerously handsome men staring broodingly from covers of bodice-rippers was an author that I enjoy (and have even reviewed here). Charlaine Harris caught my eye, and so I bought the book, despite the unfortunate lack of man-flesh on the cover. (The straight men in our audience should not be unhappy with the cover however.) The price was right, and I could at least expect something interesting.

Must Love Hellhounds is an anthology that includes novellas from four authors, starring minor characters in their larger series. Each story also includes some sort of hellhound and an introduction into the worlds that each author has created.

The stories begin with Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series. Batanya and Clovache, of the Britlingens, who are hired bodyguards from a different dimension, star in this story. In the series, we saw them most notably as they valiantly saved the Vampire King of Kentucky from a hotel bombing in the book All Together Dead. Tricked into going to hell so that a thief can recover an artifact he stole and hid from Lucifer, Batanya and Clovache must guard him with their lives.

Next, we delve into the world of the Guild Hunter Series by Nalini Singh. Here we follow the story of Sara Haziz, Vampire Guild Director and friend to the usual main character Elena Deveraux. This story tells the tale of how Sara met her partner, Deacon and became the director. In this novella, Archangels rule the world, and decide to test Sara on her abilities and loyalty. To prove both, she must find a traitor in the guild that is killing vampires that the Angels have made, and neutralize them.

Third, we follow writing team Ilona Andrews and their Kate Daniels series. In this story Kate Daniels is out from work on medical leave, so her shift is covered by friend Andrea Nash. It’s not so quiet for Andrea, who must find out why Cerberus, the three headed dog and protector of Hades is thrashing around the city. To do so, she must partner with Rafael, a man she has been trying to stay away from rather than confront secrets about who she is and what she wants. Together, they must set the balance of life and death back to its rightful place.

We end the anthology with Meljean Brooks’ Guardian Series. Maggie Wren has been given a task by her employer: find his niece and punish the people that have abducted her. Aided by her employer’s blind nephew and a hellhound, Maggie sets off to do just that. But as she gets closer to the truth of the kidnapping, she becomes more certain that she knows the captor personally. She must face her past in a way she has avoided in order to save the girl and get her home safely.

One of the things that surprised me about the book was how thrown-together the actual topic was. One would think, by looking at the cover and reading the title, that all the stories would be united in having stories that centered on hellhounds. However, not only were the hellhounds more often than not irrelevant to the story, they seemed tacked on for the most part. The most obvious exception is the Ilona Andrew’s story Magic Mourns. In fact, it was distinctly out of place in that you could not have the same intact storyline without Cerberus. In every other story, you could have taken out the hellhound, or made it a normal dog, with no real repercussions to the plot. This baffled me, as I grew up on the Sword and Sorceress anthologies, and I don’t think that Marion Zimmer Bradley would have allowed anything in those novels unless it dealt with the subject at hand. Not that I minded overmuch, I’m not too enthralled with the actual subject and I liked the stories. (Maybe if it had been hellcats?) But if someone was going to cobble together this anthology, wouldn’t a more apt title be, Must Love Sidekicks? I know I do love sidekicks! I always want to know more about them! And then no one would have had to force these authors to shovel in a character that didn’t belong to the story.

What I did take away from this anthology was that there were three more series that I would be interested in taking a look at. Besides the hellhound angle, I found all of these characters quite engaging. Ilona Andrews’ story still haunts me, because there is so much to the back story of that character, and I imagine the author(s) could write an entire series on Andrea Nash once they were done with the current Kate Daniels series. In fact, I was impressed with how all the authors could distill their visibly thought out worlds and dimensions and present them so clearly in a rather limited amount of space. That kind of tight writing leads to books that will be enjoyable too. Although I have only been in the Sookie Stackhouse world, this book gave me an appetite to try these other stories and characters.

Let’s not leave out the romantic aspects as well! It’s part and parcel of airport reading anyway. I’m a big sucker for romantic fantasies, and three out of the four stories did not disappoint on that front. Most of the book was slathered in unresolved sexual tension, which just makes everything even more interesting to me. How will these crazy kids make it work? The only story that didn’t do it for me in that regard was Charlaine Harris’ The Britlingens Go To Hell. At the end of the story, when two characters got together, I was left scratching my head over the motivation.

As I stated before, this book is like the hors d’oeuvres to the main course. I suspect that the point of this anthology is to give audiences a preview of these authors and their fantasy series, in order to hook more readers. If that’s the case, consider me hooked!

  -- Sara Paige