Touch of Frost

Touch of Frost
Jennifer Estep
350 pages
Publisher: Kensington
Source: library
★★★☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

Gwen attends Mythos Academy - school for warriors who are training to fight an epic battle should the day ever arise that Loki (the Norse god) ever escape his jail.  But Gwen isn't a Spartan or any other kind of mythological fighter, she's just a geeky Gypsy who doesn't fit it and doesn't really know why she's at the school to begin with.  But when the most popular girl in school is murdered and no one really seems to care, Gwen takes it up on herself to solve the mystery and unwittingly opens the door to all kinds of evil she didn't know could actually exist.

A supernatural/mythological boarding school - yawn, it's been done - yet for some reason I was still drawn into this novel.  Gwen is definitely a geeky character, but also immediately likable and relatable.  For that reason, I wanted to make sure she would find her feet at this academy, you know, make some friends, solve a mystery and get involved.  The novel didn't disappoint and there were many action packed pages along the way.

Once the mystery at hand got under way, I felt the plot was solid with a good number of twists and turns along the way.  It definitely wasn't straightforward who committed the crime, which was good.  The plot was solid and the characters diverse.  There was also sufficient background information to help the reader understand the concept of the academy and what was going on there; I never felt lost.

Naturally, if you've got your overlooked, geeky heroine with a major inability to wield any kind of weapon, you've got to have a brooding hero to swoop in and save the day - and that would be Logan, the school's designated "ladies-man" who for some reason has his sights set on Gwen.  I was glad to see she was wary of him at first unlike some YA heroines who fall madly in love for no reason.  I just wished that part of the plot had been more fleshed out.

Three stars!  Touch of Frost had a really solid plot with just the right amount of description, I just wish there had been more scenes involving Logan, though I'm sure there will be more of him in book two.