. . . . I'd say you should read this book. Nothing really outstanding. It's set -as most of the Buffy books from the past two years- in that alternate season three universe created by Golden and Holder where Faith and Wesley seem to not exist and Giles was never fired by the Council. But the story has more problems than that. The author seems to hide her tentative grasp of the Buffy characters by dedicating most of the first half of the book to two original characters that most Buffy-fans would not really care about to begin with, and then throwing in a lot of action in the second half so Buffy and the gang are too busy running around to have time to interact with each other in a way we are familiar with, which is good because most of the scenes when they do don't ring true and the dialogue, more often than not, doesn't sound like them either. ...it's about time they took the Buffy novels out of season 3...