Bryn Davis is back – after the FBI agreed to supply her with the Returné drug she needs in order to be able to live her life relatively normally and stress free. As long as she continues to take the Returné then she can’t be ‘killed’ except by incineration or decapitation. Any attempts will simply see her regenerate after a small amount of time, all injuries healing. However if the supply is cut off from her than she knows it’s a slow decay until a final death. The FBI has also retained the right to use her for information if they see fit and Bryn knows the knock at the door will come sooner rather than later.

On the personal front, her life is going well – the newly christened Davis Funeral Home is doing good business and keeping her busy with finding new employees and dealing with the recently bereaved. For mostly ‘safety reasons’ she’s now living with Patrick McCallister – although in separate bedrooms – and the two are working tentatively towards expanding their relationship. And Bryn is also running a loose support group for those who rely on Returné to keep themselves alive. It comes with its own array of stresses and problems, especially with people who have families and Bryn is doing her best to help others even as she continues to search for her sister.

Some of Bryn’s Returné support group members begin to disappear and the FBI appear and ask Bryn to investigate what should be a seemingly harmless company. However it seems that everything is far from harmless and straight forward and Bryn is forced to wonder if the government are starting to pick off the Returné population or if there is some new threat that has discovered the gift of eternal life and decided to remove it. Bryn’s world is about to become a whole lot more complicated and it’s going to be impossible for her to know who she can place her trust in, because pick the wrong person and she’ll wind up dead. Well, even more dead than she already is.

Two Weeks’ Notice is the second novel in Rachel Caine’s Revivalist series. I read the first novel, Working Stiff early this year and loved it, making this novel one of my most anticipated series releases of 2012. Rachel Caine really isn’t afraid to push the boundaries with this series – she did it in Working Stiff, treating us to experiencing our heroine declining without the drug that keeps her alive and she does it again here as Bryn takes advantage of the fact that she regenerates when ‘killed’ in certain ways in order to escape a desperate situation. The description of this scene is lengthy and vivid and it literally made me shudder in horror even as, in car-crash style syndrome, I couldn’t look away and frantically kept reading. Bryn is beginning to adapt to her new lifestyle and the fact that it broadens her limitations to almost boundless but that isn’t to say that she isn’t still struggling with it too. She knows that there are things she will never experience now, such as motherhood and she laments that the choice has been taken from her.

The chemistry that simmered in Working Stiff between her and Patrick ramps up more than a notch in this volume but it isn’t without its complications. The two have been taking it slow, keeping a lid on it but any pot with a lid on it boils over eventually! Almost as soon as they find new ground though, things are complicated by the return of someone from Patrick’s past, someone that Bryn didn’t even know existed and it changes things, making her question what she knows about Patrick. And Bryn already has a lot to worry about, given she feels personally responsible for the disappearance of some of the people from her Returné support group and trying to figure out precisely what the government and/or the defunct company of Pharmadene are really up to.

I feel that as a sequel, Two Weeks’ Notice delivered on every aspect – I was so taken with the idea of Working Stiff but I wasn’t quite sure how Caine was going to be able to draw it out. I see that in this book she clearly has so many ideas where it can go and new things she can inject into the story to keep it fresh and alive (no pun intended!). The scenario has endless possibilities for alliances and battles with a capacity for the teams to shift and alter depending on what the scenario is – this is evidenced in Two Weeks’ Notice when Patrick and Joe are forced to place their trust in someone previously they’d been attempting to hunt down to help them, believing they might just be the only people capable of doing what it is Patrick and Joe require.

It’s always a risk when you build up a book in your head, desperately wanting it to arrive so you can dive in and experience it. There’s always the chance that it won’t live up to the standards you’ve set and it’s even more fantastic when a book does, like this one did for me. Two Weeks’ Notice takes all the things I loved about Working Stiff and pushes them to the next level – there’s more action, more mystery, more romance, more creepiness. Oh is there more creepiness!

Now the long wait for the third novel begins.