I loved this series. Yes, the past tense is right - I loved this series to the point that around book 5 and 6, I was telling everyone who would give me five minutes in their day about great they were. I reread Spider's Revenge probably three times in five months. 
 It actually pains me to give a 3 star rating, but truthfully, the last couple books have just been okay and this one was particularly meh. I have a feeling that since book #10, this series has lost a lot of readers. It's partly to be expected that after so many books, the writing and plot become more and more formulaic, but this last arc with M.M. Monroe just felt extra uninspired. In a way, my disappointment is really a result of just how darn good this series started out. Mab as a villain was fabulous, M.M. is just kind of a wimpy wannabe, which didn't make things very interesting. The final showdown made me wish for the days of Elektra LaFleur. 
 The book did start out strong with Gin in a position that she hasn't been before - threatened under "legalese" - but that's about it. This series has always had some problems with repetition. Yes, we all known Owen's eyes are violet, Finn likes chicory coffee, Gin consistently has a flashback with Fletcher that will just so happen to perfectly correlate to her current fight, Northern Aggression's sign is a heart with an arrow through it, and so on. The problem with this book was that everything, and really everything, was a repeat. Remember when Gin almost died underground and everyone had given her up for dead, but then she shows up and everyone is relieved? Heck, even Gin constantly makes a trip down memory lane: this is the bathroom where she killed Slater's son, this is Jonah again and again and again. Oh, and everyone has kids for another generation of the same old same old. 
 There is one thing that drove me almost crazy in this book and I honestly don't know if I never noticed it in all previous 11 books (plus the Mythos Academy series and everything else Estep has written...I've read it all) OR if Ms. Estep just suddenly started doing it, OR if her editor just stopped correcting it. But the sheer amount of onomatopoeia DROVE ME NUTS. If I had a dime for every time I read a Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!, whack-whack-whack-whack, ring-ring-ring, rush-rush-rush, tack-tack-tack, scrape-scrape-scrape, thump-thump-thump-thump, I'd be rich. All of the above, by the way, are straight from the book and took me less than a minute to find. As a matter of fact, I found at least SIX other Crack! Crack! Crack!s. Seriously. Like I said, I don't know if I somehow missed it in all of her other books or just ignored it, but this is one trend that once I've noticed, I just can't get over! It got to the point where Estep will have two sentences in a row with the same thing. I'm not exaggerating, look at this: "Silence descended over the deck, and the only sound was the steady rush-rush-rush of the water flowing alongside the riverboat. 
 I put my hands flat on the table, then slowly got to my feet. The scrape-scrape-scrape of my chair against the deck was as loud as a machine gun." 
 So I know this is a very small thing in the grand scheme of things, but I just had to rant about it somewhere. Have I mentioned that at one point, I loved this series to death and forced my boyfriend to listen to me talk about Gin during an entire two hour drive? All of which means that at the end of the day, I will always still be reading Estep's works and admiring her writing, no matter how formulaic it may start feeling (or how many crack!s she can possibly put in). This novel in particular just irritated me in too many ways for me to really enjoy, but I'm pretty sure the next will be back to standard.