I really do like this series a lot. I love the characters and I will read any book that Eileen Wilks writes about the Lupi and Lily and Rule. Mortal Ties starts in late December I believe about a month or so after the events of Death Magic. Everyone is on high alert after the events in Death Magic. There is a war going on in the magical community, mainly between the Lupi and their great evil foe (who they go without naming). Her associate Robert Friar is at large and basically Mortal Ties finds our characters waiting to see what will happen next. Well, they quickly find out when a fire is started on one of the mountains on Clanhome grounds and everyone is trying to deal with the situation. While everyone else is tied up someone breaks into Cullen's workshop and steals his prototype for a device that will help with tech around magic. 
 The book starts out as a good mystery. Obviously everyone points at Friar as the culprit but how? How does everything connect back to him. I almost felt like this storyline became overshadowed with everything else that we introduced or discovered in this book. There was a lot that happened, that we learned about yet the prototype (the thing that kind of kicked off the whole story) gets shoved in the backgound. Honestly, by the end I couldn't remember very much about its status in the overall story. 
 Don't get me wrong I thought the rest of the stuff that we learned in this book was interesting, but I think that there would have been a different way to go about introducing some of it without involving the prototype, if that indeed was not going to be essential throughout. 
 With this book I also have a little issue of timing. Up to this point, I've liked that the timeline of the series has gone slowly. There's maybe usually a month or two between books. But at this point there are some things (like Rule and Lily's wedding) that we've been hearing about for so long, I just want them to have happened already. It takes a good flow with a storyline and keeps throwing it out at us so much that by the time the actual event comes around, I'm already over it. Maybe I'm just impatient. I don't know. 
 I almost think of this book as more of a bridge book. There's stuff that happens, but nothing too significant to the overall story arc of the war. I guess I can understand because the events in Death Magic were intense. So this book just slows the pace down a little. 
 There is a nice snippet at the end of this book for the next in the series coming in 2013. Until Then!