Hunting in Bruges

By: E.J. Stevens

Narrated by: Melanie A. Mason, Anthony Bowling

Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's Summary

Finalist for the 2017 Raven Award for best urban fantasy.

The only thing worse than being a hunter in the fae-ridden city of Harborsmouth, is hunting vampires in Bruges.

The medieval city of Bruges is quaint, but the local Hunters' Guild is understaffed, the canals are choked with dead bodies, and there's no shortage of supernatural predators as likely suspects.

On second thought, maybe Bruges isn't so bad after all.

With a desire to prove herself, protect the innocent, and advance within the ranks of the Hunters' Guild, Jenna Lehane hits the cobbled streets of Bruges with blades at the ready. Someone, or something, is murdering tourists and dumping their bodies in the city's scenic canals. With the help of a mysterious stranger, Jenna begins to piece together clues that are dotted throughout the city like blood spatter.

Determined to stop the killings, Jenna delves into a bloody local history that only raises more questions - but some secrets are best left buried. Jenna must put her combat training to the test as she struggles to unearth the truth about an ancient enemy.

"I quite enjoyed the tale." (Jana Oliver, award-winning author of The Demon Trappers series)

"Hunting in Bruges is a must read." (Book Lover's Life)

"I flat out loved it!" (Rabid Reads)

"[Hunting in Bruges] is a well-crafted and fun urban fantasy." (The Jeep Diva)

Hunting in Bruges is the first novel in the Hunters' Guild urban fantasy series set in the world of Ivy Granger. The world of Ivy Granger, including the Hunters' Guild series and the award-winning Ivy Granger Psychic Detective series, is filled with bloodsucking vampires, psychotic faeries, and snarky, kick-butt heroines.

©2014 E.J. Stevens (P)2018 E.J. Stevens

Excellent Fast Paced Urban Fantasy

This is a fast paced Urban Fantasy with a strong heroine. Here you will find mystery, action, danger, violence, and a touch of romance. Jenna meets a handsome stranger on the train to Bruges that helps her navigate the city she is assigned to investigate. There are dead bodies being found all over the city and Jenna is there to find out what is going on.

Narration is excellent and brings the story to life. Melanie and Anthony do an amazing job with the narration.

There is a good amount of character development so we can understand what drives Jenna and why she has decided to join the Hunter's Guild. Ivy Granger is mentioned a few times as being a trusted friend of Jenna. Perhaps she will make an appearance in future books. This is a great start to a new series.

I'm looking forward to book 2 in this new fast paced Urban Fantasy series.

"I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review."

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Awesome story & narration

I received this audiobook free for an honest review. So glad I asked for this audiobook. It was fast paced, informative and thrilling. I love stories of strong women and Jenna fits the mold perfectly. The history being used as background builds the foundation for an excellent story. The narrators were awesome. Their telling the story was as if it was on the big screen. Overall, the story was great and the narrators were wonderful. Very enjoyable. Funny and intriguing.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Brilliant !

vampire-slayers, action-adventure, teamwork, urban-fantasy ----
Excellent read! Jenna had a hard enough life before she joined the guild of hunters, and that's what gave her the strength of purpose and determination to stick with a job that makes the USMC look easy. She is sent from the US (Milwaukee! Chicago! ) to the EU where it's all in flux and little is what it seems. Great characters and storyline with fast pacing and lots of surprises.
I have the audio, and it's excellent. Female characters are interpreted by Melanie Mason, and gents by Anthony Bowling, and the result is spectacular!

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Jenna's a focused hunter on a mission

*I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

Melanie & Anthony are the same duo that's voiced the Ivy Granger stories. I might have liked a new voice for Jenna and the people she meets then works with, but they do well. As always they have clean audio with two voices. They break the characters as female and male, as expected. It's nice to hear the male voices voiced separately from the original narrator. Some of the characters have accents, which is portrayed by the narrators. Nice.

We start with Jenna and why she feels she's sent on this mission so suddenly. And getting to Bruges. This gives us a transition from Harborsmouth and Ivy to Jenna and Bruges We also learn about Jenna's ability to see and hear ghosts.

This story gives us insight into the Hunters' Guild. Interesting group of people. We start to get to see more of them with Ivy, but now we are in the inner loop.

The story feels tightly written. The case of the multiple dead bodies is something Jenna is on. She's determined to find the monster doing the work. But she also has to deal with the hunters guild here in Burge. She's quick to get started when she arrives in town. Though, she starts to make the current hunters look as though they are slacking with her quick work.

E.J. has a few red herrings tossed in there to get us to wonder about who is behind these events, but I figured it out from the beginning. And I was happy to see I was right in my thinking when I got verification in the end.

I like the chapter headings. It is a line from in the chapter, but it points out Hunter ways or Jenna's "rules". It's a neat way to highlight them and give us a feel of Jenna and a few other characters. Jenna's focused. And I get a feel she's modest yet aware of her abilities. She very much tries to follow the rules and takes being a hunter seriously. I like this about her. In the beginning Jenna came across as though she reminded me of another Ivy. As the story went, Jenna became her own person and I found I liked her. I really like she doesn't talk about herself like Ivy does, like she has to explain who she is. Jenna just does and knows who she is. I think I enjoyed Jenna and her story much more than Ivy's.

Jenna's quickly meeting people and making friends... and enemies. Grrrr. There is one man who is against all women in the guild along with supernaturals. He's a real jerk. I couldn't wait for Jenna to knock him down a peg, or five. Then there's Ash, he's a joy. I love her time with him although I want to shack her as she should have picked up the signs and hints about Ash right away. However, there is something different about Ash when he's with Jenna. I'm hoping we get answers to this in the future. But I do love Ash. He's a cutie.

All in all, I enjoyed Jenna's adventures. And would like to hear more of her adventures with her new crew. Sounds like these adventures could be interesting.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Great Series Starter

Hunting in Bruges is a good series starter. Jenna is a strong willed, egotistical workaholic. This story is fast paced with tons of action and interesting human and paranormal characters. I enjoyed both of the narrators distinctive character voices and they did a fantastic job bringing the story and characters to life. Ivy Granger is mentioned a few times in this story so I hope she makes an appearance in future stories. I look forward to more in this series and from this author

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Wow

I got this story via audiobook boom and this is my voluntary review. All I can say about this story is wow. There were so many plot twists that it was hard to keep up sometimes but Jeanna was determined to do what she was sent to Bruges to do. She would not allow a self-righteous prude get in her way and even recruited the help of a blind librarian. How cool is that? The narrator was good and moved the story right along. The emotions involved came through clearly.

A great start to a new series

This series takes place at about the same time as the end of the Ivy Granger series and some of the events from Ivy Granger are mentioned. It is not necessary to read the Ivy Granger series first, but it was excellent and I highly recommend it.

This series follows Jenna Lehane from the hunters guild. She's a strong, confident and capable lead character and I couldn't help but like her. My standout character however was Ash, he was such fun and his unique situation left me laughing out loud at times.

There's lots of action going on and it's backed up with a solid plot. The world building is excellent and so are the characters. I like the attention to detail that helps bring everything to life.

The narration is well done, the character voices are distinct and recognizable and the delivery matched what was happening in the book. The dual narration worked well.

I received a free copy of this book from the author and/or narrator and/or publisher and I voluntarily wrote this honest review.

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Hunting

Melanie A. Mason & Anthony Bowling did a great job bringing the characters and the world E.J. Stevens created to life.

Each situation and emotion was beautifully portrayed.

I enjoyed Jenna's character. UF is the best platform to create strong female characters.


Looking forward to the next book in the series. I would like to see Jenna grow both professionally and personally.

Ivy Granger fans will enjoy this spinoff story

I’ve been a fan of the Ivy Granger series for a while. This spinoff series follows a character we meet in the Ivy Granger series. It takes place after book three in Ivy Granger, but can be read as a stand alone series. Jenna is a hunter. She works for the Hunter’s Guild and can see ghosts. She really likes to kill vampires and strings their fangs on a necklace as a trophy.

So, Jenna is shipped off to Bruges, Belgium to help them find out why so many people are turning up dead. Most of the hunters are in Brussels for a big meeting, so the Bruges guild is running on a skeleton crew. The man left in charge is quite the ass. He doesn’t like women and doesn’t think they should be hunters, so him and Jenna get off on the wrong foot right from the start.

I should back up a bit, on the train to Bruges from Brussels, Jenna meets a man named Ash. He shows her around Bruges just a bit before she goes to the guild. During this time, we get a good picture of Bruges. The descriptions are really great. I loved hearing about the architecture of the old buildings.

So, back to the guild, there is Simon Chadwick who is in charge of the guild for right now and he is an ass. There is also Celeste, who is a witch that is also a bit of a junkie. She smokes stuff that would be toxic to a human, but just gets witches high. It can also cause them to lose their memory and not be very good with magic any more. Aleksey Zharkov is a one-handed guy that is the demolitions expert for the team. He likes his job a little too much. Darryl Lambert is a blind librarian who gets around pretty well, even with his handicap. Last, but not least is Benjamin Martens, the doc.

So Jenna has to find out who is killing people in Bruges and just leaving them on the street and with this ragtag group of hunters. And while Ash is trying to sight see and socialize with her.

This is a fun story. There is a lot of action and, as I said, the descriptions of the town are great. It is a bit predictable. There are a few things that I figured out pretty quickly, but I still enjoyed the story. I would love to read more stories about Jenna. She really took control and grew in this story. I didn’t love this story as much as the Ivy Granger stories. While, I enjoyed the secondary characters in this, I didn’t like them as much as Jinx and the gang back in Harborsmouth. I do think this is a great addition for people who are looking to start learning about this world or for people already familiar with Ivy Granger.

Narration
This audiobook is recorded in a format called duet. It features a female and male narrator. In this book, the female does the majority of the narration, because this book is told entirely from the woman’s POV. She does all the narration for the female dialogues and the non-dialogue pieces of the story. The male just read the sentence from the male POVs. This is not my favorite form of audiobook. I find it a bit jarring at first when the male narrator comes in during the middle of a chapter (so far, this is the only series that I listen to that is recorded in this format). The more I listen to the story, the more I’m okay with it, but at the start of each book, it always takes me a bit to get into it. I know people who love this format and prefer it over anything else. So this is a person thing for me. If you haven’t tried this format, I suggest you give it a try sometime and see what you think of it.

I will say that I do like these narrators. I think they both do a really good job. I like the voices that they use for each of the characters. I did think that this sounded a lot like Ivy, though it is hard for me to say for sure because it has been over a year since I listened to my last Ivy Granger book. I would listen to this pair again.

Really enjoyable.

I’m a fan of the Ivy Granger books and Jenna was one of my favourite characters I’ve been looking forward to this audiobook.
Love the new characters especially Ash.
I would have liked to hear what happened to Chad.
Both the voiceover artists did a wonderful job and I hope they do the next book.

I was given acolytes of this audiobook but any opinions are honest and my own.