I liked Midnight Thief, but there were a few minor things that kept me from giving it four stars. I enjoyed Poison Dance, the prequel to this and even mentioned that it felt very adult to be a prequel to a YA book. I liked James as a character in that story. However, Midnight Thief did not go where I thought it would go with his character at all. James is a completely unsympathetic, horrible person in Midnight Thief and it didn't feel like I was reading about the same person at all. I'm not sure if he was written about the way he was in the prequel to illustrate the reasons behind why he is the way he is in this book (but it still didn't seem to fit with the character from the prequel), or if it was just to make the reader trust him more in the beginning of this book. Because of the prequel I trusted him a lot more than I initially would have had I not read it. So I was surprised when he turned out to be so horrible. I'm not sure how I feel about the demon cats in this. Instead of feeling like cool shape shifters, they felt a little cheesy, and I kept picturing the cats from the Warriors book series, although that could have been because my daughter is reading those and they were on my mind already. A lot more world building could be done here, but there will be more books so we may get more later and some elements of the story seemed very contrived. Overall I liked the first half of the book better than the second half.
