On Nursing: A Review of Nighshifted by Cassie Alexander

I bought this book based on the description, and looked at reviews after the fact. They were pretty mixed, and many of them quite critical. So when I started I had some feelings of trepidation, to be sure.

Edie's brother is a drug addict, and she's sick of watching him flirt with overdose and infection. So when she's offered a mysterious nursing job on a floor called Y4, in exchange for a mysterious promise that her brother will become clean, she takes it. Y4 turns out to be where non-human patients are sent--vampires and their servants, werewolves, shapeshifters, zombies, and so forth.   When a patient dies on Edie's watch, having asked her with his last words to find Anna, she's compelled to do just that. Her actions soon put her on trial with the vampires, in a life or death struggle for survival.

The best parts of the book are, without a doubt, those that take place in the hospital. You can tell the author knows nursing, and has just added the supernatural parts in for flavor, and as a result it feels very real. I was drawn into Edie's life and her struggles to fit in and do her job.

Edie's a surprisingly novel sort of heroine. She's kind of a screw up--she makes mistakes that endanger patients and coworkers, she makes questionable personal decisions, she has random unprotected sex...But she has a good heart, too, and she means well, and she's terribly easy to relate to. At every turn, I could easily see myself making the same fatal errors.

Among the secondary characters, we meet a zombie and a shapeshifter--both potential love interests, predictably. But the zombie is really different from your typical UF hero, and I found myself very intrigued by him. He's not at all attractive, for one, with lots of scars. I hope to see more of him as the series progresses.

The biggest problem with the book is that, outside of the hospital the plot mostly drags. It is not nearly as inspired, and the mystery is not something I could force myself to care about.

Overall, this urban fantasy manages to stand out a bit because of the medical aspects and it's oddly appealing heroine. I hope for great things from this series. 4 stars.