Women of the Otherworld

Women of the Otherworld is an Urban Fantasy series written by Kelley Armstrong.

Overview
The series tells the stories of a diverse group of strong, smart, and skillful supernatural women and their equally talented mates.

Books

 * 1) Bitten (2001)
 * 2) Stolen (2002)
 * 3) Dime Store Magic (2003)
 * 4) Industrial Magic (2004)
 * 5) Haunted (May 31, 2005; 495 pgs)
 * 6) Broken (2006)
 * 7) No Humans Involved (Apr. 25, 2006; 444 pgs)
 * 8) Personal Demon (Mar. 25, 2008; 371 pgs)
 * 9) Living with the Dead (Oct. 21, 2008; 372 pgs)
 * 10) Frostbitten (Sept. 29, 2009; 339 pgs)
 * 11) Waking the Witch (July 27, 2010; 309 pgs)
 * 12) Spell Bound (Aug 4, 2011; 352 pgs)
 * 13) Thirteen (July 26, 2012; 444 pgs)

Publishing Information

 * Publishers: Plume, Orbit, Bantam, Vintage Canada, Penguin Group USA/Dutton,

Bitten
Elena Michaels is the world’s only female werewolf. And she’s tired of it. Tired of a life spent hiding and protecting, a life where her most important job is hunting down rogue werewolves. Tired of a world that not only accepts the worst in her–her temper, her violence–but requires it. Worst of all, she realizes she’s growing content with that life, with being that person.

So she left the Pack and returned to Toronto where she’s trying to live as a human. When the Pack leader calls asking for her help fighting a sudden uprising, she only agrees because she owes him. Once this is over, she’ll be squared with the Pack and free to live life as a human. Which is what she wants. Really.

Bitten is the basis of the Syfy & Space TV series by the same name.

Stolen
When a young witch tells Elena that a group of humans are kidnapping supernaturals, Elena ignores the warning. After all, everyone knows there’s no such thing as witches. As for the thought of other ‘supernaturals’, well, she’d just rather not dwell on the possibility. Soon, however, she’s confronted with the truth about her world, when she’s kidnapped and thrown into a cell-block with witches, sorcerers, half-demons and other werewolves. As Elena soon discovers, dealing with her fellow captives is the least of her worries. In this prison, the real monsters carry the keys.

Dime Store Magic
Leader of the American Coven, guardian to the preteen daughter of a black witch … it’s not the lifestyle twenty-three year-old Paige Winterbourne imagined for herself, and it’s wreaking hell on her social life. But she’s up to the challenge. When half-demon Leah O’Donnell returns to fight for custody of Savannah, Paige is ready. She’s not as prepared for the team of supernaturals Leah brings with her, including a powerful sorcerer who claims to be Savannah’s father. Cut off from her friends, accused of witchcraft, Satanism, necromancy, murder…Paige quickly realizes that keeping Savannah could mean losing everything else. Has she finally found a battle she isn’t willing to fight?

Industrial Magic
Think your in-laws are scary? Try meeting Paige Winterbourne’s potential father-in-law: CEO of the Cortez Cabal, a multinational corporation…and the supernatural equivalent of the Mafia. Lucas Cortez has devoted his life to ruining the Cabals, though that doesn’t stop his father from expecting him to take over the family business someday. Benicio’s favorite ploy is to appeal to Lucas’s quixotic ideals by asking him to investigate Cabal cases of injustice. After years of failure, Benicio finally has the perfect case: a teenage witch attacked and left for dead. Refusing will be difficult enough for Lucas…near impossible for his new witch girlfriend. Paige and Lucas soon discover that the young witch wasn’t the first Cabal teenager attacked. When the infighting among the Cabals threatens to let the killer continue his spree, Paige and Lucas decide it’s up to them to stop him. The chase takes them on a cross-country hunt through the supernatural world, where allies can be found in the strangest places, including a celebrity necromancer, a wise-cracking Celtic deity, a pissed-off ghost, a half-mad clairvoyant, and a group of vampires who’d really rather be in an Anne Rice novel.

Haunted
Eve Levine made a bargain with Fate, and now she’s come to collect, sending Eve off on a quest to retrieve the soul of an escaped demi-demon. Playing ghost world bounty hunter isn’t exactly what Eve had in mind for an afterlife career, but a deal is a deal. Eve never breaks a promise…even when the cost of repaying that debt turns out to be more than this ghost can afford.

Broken
When half-demon Xavier calls in the favour Elena owes him, it seems easy enough, steal Jack the Ripper’s ‘From Hell’ letter away from a Toronto collector who had himself stolen it from the Ripper evidence boxes. But nothing in the supernatural world is ever as simple as it seems. Elena accidentally triggers a spell placed on the letter, and opens a dimensional portal into Victorian London, releasing zombies, disease, and maybe the notorious serial killer himself. Here are two long-missing deleted scenes from the book: “the one about the pregnancy test” (here) and “the one where Elena & Nick play parents-to-be” (here) Thanks to readers who’d kept PDFs of these two when I didn’t.

No Humans Involved
Jaime, who knows a thing or two about showbiz, is on a television shoot in Los Angeles when weird things start to happen. As a woman whose special talent is raising the dead, her threshold for weirdness is pretty high: she’s used to not only seeing dead people but hearing them speak to her in very emphatic terms. But for the first time in her life–as invisible hands brush her skin, unintelligible fragments of words are whispered into her ears, and beings move just at the corner of her eye–she knows what humans mean when they talk about being haunted. She is determined to get to the bottom of these manifestations, but as she sets out to solve the mystery she has no idea how scary her investigation will get. As she digs into the dark underside of Los Angeles, she’ll need as much Otherworld help as she can get in order to survive, calling on her personal angel, Eve, and Hope, the well-meaning chaos demon. Jeremy, the alpha werewolf, is also by her side offering protection. And, Jaime hopes, maybe a little more than that.

Personal Demon
Half-demon tabloid reporter Hope Adams has a secret. Like full demons, she loves chaos. She thrives on it. She needs it. Most of the time, Hope feeds the hunger by helping the interracial council. But it’s never enough. So when Benicio Cortez offers her a job infiltrating a gang of young supernaturals, she thinks she’s found the perfect solution. Instead, she finds a tinderbox of greed, desire and ambition. And when it ignites, a world is going to explode.

Living with the Dead
When Robyn Peltier–a very human PR rep–is framed for murder, the two people most determined to clear her name are half-demon tabloid reporter Hope Adams, and necromancer homicide detective John Findlay. And suddenly Robyn finds herself in the heart of a world she never knew existed–and which she is safer knowing nothing about….

Frostbitten
The Alaskan wilderness is a harsh landscape in the best of conditions, but with a pack of rogue werewolves on the loose, it’s downright deadly. Elena Michaels, the Pack’s chief enforcer, knows all too well the havoc “mutts” can wreak. When word comes of a series of humans apparently killed by wolves near Anchorage, Elena and Clay are sent to check things out. But they find more than they bargained for among the snow and trees of the savage Alaskan wilderness.

Waking the Witch
The orphaned daughter of a sorcerer and a half-demon, Savannah is a terrifyingly powerful young witch who has never been able to resist the chance to throw her magical weight around. But at 21 she knows she needs to grow up and prove to her guardians, Paige and Lucas, that she can be a responsible member of their supernatural detective agency. So she jumps at the chance to fly solo, investigating the mysterious deaths of three young women in a nearby factory town as a favour to one of the agency’s associates. At first glance, the murders look garden-variety human, but on closer inspection signs point to otherworldly stakes. Soon Savannah is in over her head. She’s run off the road and nearly killed, haunted by a mystery stalker, and freaked out when the brother of one of the dead women is murdered when he tries to investigate the crime. To complicate things, something weird is happening to her powers. Pitted against shamans, demons, a voodoo-inflected cult and garden-variety goons, Savannah has to fight to ensure her first case isn’t her last. And she also has to ask for help, perhaps the hardest lesson she’s ever had to learn.

Spell Bound
Savannah Levine is in terrible danger, and for once she’s powerless to help herself. At the conclusion of Waking the Witch, Savannah swore that she would give up her powers if it would help a young girl. Little did she know that someone would take her up on that promise. And now, witch hunting assassins, necromancers, half-demons, and rogue witches all seem to be after her. The threat is not just for Savannah; every member of the Otherworld might be at risk. While most of her fellow supernaturals are circling the wagons at a gathering of the council in Miami, Savannah is caught on the road, isolated from those who can protect her and unable to use her vast spell casting talent, the thing she counts on most. In a story that will change the shape of the Otherworld forever, Spell Bound gathers Elena, Clay, Paige, Lucas, Jaime, Hope, and others, who soon learn that the greatest threat to supernaturals just may come from within.

Thirteen
A war is brewing—the first battle has been waged and Savannah Levine is left standing, albeit battered and bruised. She has rescued her half brother from supernatural medical testing, but he’s fighting to stay alive. The Supernatural Liberation Movement took him hostage, and they have a plan to expose the supernatural world to the unknowing. Savannah has called upon her inner energy to summon spells with frightening strength, a strength she never knew she had, as she fights to keep her world from shattering. But it’s more than a matter of supernaturals against one another—both heaven and hell have entered the war; hellhounds, genetically modified werewolves, and all forces of good and evil have joined the fray. Uniting Savannah with Adam, Paige, Lucas, Jaime, Hope, and other lost-but-notforgotten characters in one epic battle, for a grand series finale.

Awards
12. Spell Bound 13. Thirteen
 * Nominee of the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards "Best Paranormal Fantasy" category
 * Nominee of the 2012 Goodreads Choice Awards "Best Paranormal Fantasy" category