Heat Stroke – Rachel Caine

I know, I only read the first Weather Warden book a short time ago, and vowed to hold off buying more. But I am weak and, like all dieters, my restraint was broken by a binge of book buying (fifteen novels in a day and a half).
Caine kindly prefaces her sequel with a one-page summation of the first book, which opens “My name is Joanne Baldwin and I used to control the weather,” and ends “At least I still have a really fast car.” Heat Stroke picks up right after Ill Wind left off – thanks to the love of free Djinn David, Jo’s been brought back from the dead and has entered (in a way long unprecedented) Djinnhood. The powers she had as a Weather Warden are nothing compared to her new abilities, including the knack of being undetectable at will, which allows Jo and David to attend her memorial service.
But bringing someone back from the dead, even if not to their previous life, does not come without a price, and Jo has to prove herself to the mysterious and powerful Jonathan, who lives sequestered away in a textured world created solely by his will and skill. He and David have a strange, almost sexual connection, and a significant past that affects Jo’s future. Jonathan demands Jo prove herself, and he orders Patrick (a lecherous Santa look-alike, with the taste of a baroque whore) take over her training. Patrick is uniquely able to tutor Jo – he is the only other human to become Djinn, at great cost to the Djinn who created him. As part of her training, Jo is bound to her old friend Lewis – as long as the bottle he’s bound her to is intact, Jo is at the mercy of the holder of her bottle. She agrees to being bound, knowing Lewis will never abuse her trust or take advantage of her bound state.
But a troubled adolescent captures Jo’s bottle, and she discovers what it feels like to be at the whim of another being. Although she can use avoidance and nit-picking detail to stave off the inevitable, like all captured Djinn she cannot disobey a direct order given by the holder of her bottle. As David told her, it’s like rape. Djinn don’t even get to choose how they appear – when Kevin orders her to materialise, she does so dressed in a skimpy hooker outfit, from pouty red lips, across an expand bosom, down to the come-fuck-me heels.
All too soon Jo is embroiled not only in a fight between the Wardens and a secret group known as the Ma’at (who work to free Djinn from their enslavement as involuntary tools to boost the Warden’s powers), but in a struggle to save the world itself from a rent only the Djinn can, and only Jo or David can stop, all while working within the confines of orders given by a traumatised and increasingly vengeful boy.
I found this second instalment as exhilarating and enchanting as the first. Jo Baldwin is a developed character with her own voice, a love of fast cars, and I even like her obsession with clothes and shoes, which usually irritates me in chick lit heroines. I went straight from Heat Stroke to book three, Chill Factor. - Alex