Michelle Sagara, the name she now usually writes under, is a Japanese-Canadian writer with an amazing sense of vision and ideas to add to the realm of fantasy fiction. Her current series is known as the Chronicles of Elantra and, atm, numbers 5 books with at least two more on the way. I just completed reading books 4 and 5, Cast in Fury and Cast in Silence.
The city of Elantra is ruled over by the Eternal Emperor, the head of the Dragon race, and houses large groups of several other races, among them the humans, Aerians, Leotines, Barrani, Tha'alani and other Dragons. Kaylin Neya is a young woman born and raised in the fiefs, an rough and deadly area just outside of Elantra, on the other side of the river, and outside the Emperor's rule. She is one of the lucky few who made it out of the fiefs and into the city and she now works for one of the branches of city law. As a Hawk, she intereacts with many people and has many unusal duties...all of which are made that much more unusual by her own past and how it interacts with her present.
In Cast in Fury, Kaylin finds herself interacting even more heavily with the Leontines than normal. The Leontines are a race of lion-like humanoids with fur, razor sharp teeth and claws, tempers and fairly strict familai codes. But Kaylin loves them a great deal, and not just for their nifty swear words. So when there is trouble in the Leontine district, she get's stuck into it even when ordered not to and does her best to save people as well as find justice.
I really enjoyed this as she creates her characters and paints everything so vividly. The Leontine people should be more scary and harder to relate to but you really end up loving them and getting very involved in the story.
Cast in Silence takes Kaylin back to the fiefs she escaped so many years ago, in the attempt to find out what is going on with the strange events there and, hopefully, prevent anything bad happening to the city she had grown to love so much.
Like the rest of the Elantra series, both books are amazingly well written. Michelle Sagara creates races and people that you fall in love with and you really end up caring what happens to them. Also, the actual events and stories are engaging and just complicated enough to make you really think about what's going on and why.
I originally picked up the first book in this series because I had liked her previous work but I kept picking them because they're enjoyable and interesting and very much worth reading. I'm, personally, looking forward to the next couple books because I already wanted more, the minute I finished the most recent book.
