#5 in the Taylor Jackson series. With Fitz still missing, The Pretender still on the loose, & Baldwin having to be back in Quantico, Taylor is overrun with a new murder. 7 teenagers in one neighborhood. Sifting through evidence, motive, & the occult has Taylor & McKenzie trying to figure out the who's & whys while trying to keep an open mind on the witchcraft aspect. Meanwhile, the book delves into Baldwin's background & an old case involving him & Charlotte. Not as good as the other books in the series. Too much occult & witchcraft mumbo jumbo. ( )

a little too incestuous for my tastes. Murder mystery parts were good though. ( )

I picked up 'The Immortals' because I was intrigued by the blurb (Hallowe'en. The night when eight Nashville teenagers are found dead, with occult symbols carved into their naked bodies.) I hadn't read (or heard of) Taylor Jackson and didn’t realize that this was the fifth installment of a series. Had I known I probably still would have chosen is as the extent to which a series' back-story intrudes on the main plot is worth mentioning in a review.

'The Immortals' begins dramatically with the discovery of the bodies of seven murdered and teenagers and one more clinging to life. These eight teens were found at six different crime scenes and each was found with pentagrams carved into their bodies. Ellison does an excellent job of portraying the chaotic atmosphere and sense of panic that such discoveries, one right after another, would have to create, especially in a bucolic suburban neighborhood as Green Hills. With such a beginning it would have been very tempting for an author to continue apace and end up with a B-grade psycho-killer hack-n-slash farce. Surprisingly, J. T. Ellison didn’t do that. She presented the reader with a well-considered police procedural approach to solving the murders that I thought was very realistic and plausible. Even when she introduced a Wiccan priestess into the witness pool it was obvious that she had researched the subject thoroughly and wasn’t just feeding the flames of witchcraft hysteria.

The only problem I have with the book is the way in which Ellison includes elements of previous books into the story. I have no problem with back stories but I really don’t want to be told things about a book I haven’t read that may spoil my enjoyment of it should I choose to read it. In this case I learned that certain bad guys from previous books are still on the loose and targeting members of Jackson's team. J. T. Ellison is definitely an author whose books should be read in order starting from the beginning. If, like me, you wish to start with this book, you may wish to skip the first two pages to the paragraph beginning with 'The chief was pinning something to her uniform…'

Review copy provided by Amazon Vine program. ( )

The Immortals (Taylor Jackson) by J. T. Ellison (Mass Market Paperback - Oct 1, 2010)
In this sometimes confusing and sometimes unsuspensful, suspense novel we catch up to Taylor Jackson just as she has been reinstated to the Nashville PD and as the ceremony finishes, congratulations are passed around and they are off to celebrate Taylor gets called to the scene of a crime. A horrific ritualistic murder involving a teenager. Then she is called to another murder, then another and another and so on. At the same time, her fiancé Baldwin has been called back to Quantico to deal with something that had happened a number of years ago.

This is the 5th book in the Taylor Jackson series and some readers may find it a bit difficult to understand fully what is going on and who is who and how they relate to Taylor since the book is sprinkled liberally with references from earlier books.
What could have been an exciting fast paced novel of suspense and thrills just based on the types of murders they are, quickly can become frustrating to the reader when the reader realizes that this is not going to be able to be read as a stand alone

One of my problems with a few novels is some authors ability to pull a reader so far out of the main story by telling a second story that has absolutely no bearing on the main theme. And that is what I felt happened with "The Immortals". Every time the suspense started to build and it finally was becoming a page-turner, Ellison would break from the main story to tell a secondary story that mostly took place many years ago.
While I understood that the protagonist was a teenager and that sometimes teens have ego issues, I found "Raven" to be especially pompous, a blow-hard, overly erudite and annoying beyond the normal feelings that one has for a possible murderer.

Unfortunately, though I really wanted to enjoy this novel just based on the ideas laid out in the description, I just could not get into it and find anything to recommend to anyone.

Edited to add this********SPOILER ALERT*********

If you have issues with incest you may want to stay away form this book---while it's not a huge part of the theme of the book, due to the nature of the sex scenes it may be of concern to some.

The Immortals (Taylor Jackson) by J. T. Ellison (Mass Market Paperback - Oct 1, 2010)
In this sometimes confusing and sometimes unsuspensful, suspense novel we catch up to Taylor Jackson just as she has been reinstated to the Nashville PD and as the ceremony finishes, congratulations are passed around and they are off to celebrate Taylor gets called to the scene of a crime. A horrific ritualistic murder involving a teen ager. Then she is called to another murder, then another and another and so on. At the same time, her fiancé Baldwin has been called back to Quantico to deal with something that had happened a number of years ago.

This is the 5th book in the Taylor Jackson series and some readers may find it a bit difficult to understand fully what is going on and who is who and how they relate to Taylor since the book is sprinkled liberally with references from earlier books.
What could have been an exciting fast paced novel of suspense and thrills just based on the types of murders they are, quickly can become frustrating to the reader when the reader realizes that this is not going to be able to be read as a stand alone

One of my problems with a few novels is some authors ability to pull a reader so far out of the main story by telling a second story that has absolutely no bearing on the main theme. And that is what I felt happened with “The Immortals”. Every time the suspense started to build and it finally was becoming a page-turner, Ellison would break from the main story to tell a secondary story that mostly took place many years ago.
While I understood that the protagonist was a teenager and that sometimes teens have ego issues, I found “Raven” to be especially pompous, a blow-hard, overly erudite and annoying beyond the normal feelings that one has for a possible murder.

Unfortunately, though I really wanted to enjoy this novel just based on the ideas laid out in the description, I just could not get into it and find anything to recommend to anyone. ( )