As an assassin, she kills people for money–sometimes, as in the case of the shrink, they’re people who seem to deserve killing, since they are killers themselves. Her tragic past sets up some conflicts that drive the earlier novels, but her transition from highly paid assassin to one-woman wrecking crew, determined to clean up the corrupt and violent city in which she lives, makes her far more enemies as the series progresses. But she also has Ice magic, and her dual talents make her unusual and powerful–and an object of concern for Fire Elemental Mab Monroe, who is just one of many archenemies that Gin faces during the course of the novels.Īs a character, Gin is delightful: she’s ruthless yet principled (as her execution of the rapist orderly demonstrates) and she’s fearless. Gin can “listen” to stone, draw power from it, and even make her skin rock-hard to protect against attacks. We also learn that Gin has Stone Magic–she is an Elemental, or someone who has magic based on one of the four elements: Stone, Air, Ice, or Fire. She dispatches the shrink–and job for which she is being paid handsomely–then offs an orderly who rapes patients, just on principle, before escaping back to Fletcher’s BBQ joint, the Pork Pit. We meet Gin on a job she’s gone undercover in a mental institution to get close to a predatory shrink who preyed on her clients. When Book 1 opens, Gin is thirty years old and already has made quite a name for herself as the assassin The Spider. Gin survives and is taken in by an assassin named Fletcher Lane, who raises her and teaches her to be a ruthless killer-for-hire like himself. Gin Blanco was orphaned as a young child when power-hungry elemental Mab Monroe killed her mother and sisters in an attempt to wipe out a family whose powers were said to surpass her own. A new book, Poison Promise, will be released in July 2014.

Two e-novellas, Thread of Death and Kiss of Venom, are also available. Books in the series include Spider’s Bite, Web of Lies, Venom, Tangled Threads, Spider’s Revenge, By a Thread, Widow’s Web, Deadly Sting, Heart of Venom, and The Spider. Since then, she’s cranked out about two titles a year, chronicling the bloody adventures of The Spider, an assassin with, yes, a very particular set of skills. In 2010, Jennifer Estep, author of the YA series Mythos Academy, published Spider’s Bite, the first book in the Elemental Assassin series featuring Gin Blanco, a.k.a.

Spider's Bite by Jennifer Estep