One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Urban Fantasy Romance
Series: Transplanted Tales, Book 3
Rating: 3 Stars
Length: 251 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Kensington Books via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Trish Muffett, investigator for the Fairytale Management Authority, just finished working a brutal crime scene when she's attacked by the two vampires responsible for the victim's death. For a Tale like Trish, vampires aren't unusual, but the two who attack her in the alley feel different than normal Tale vamps. And she has no idea why.

It's not like she has time to figure it out, either, what with trying not to die and all. Fortunately for Trish, not dying gets a lot easier when Chicago's very own vigilante, The Spider, comes to her rescue.

She is stunned when she recognizes the Tale to whom she now owes her life. The Spider is none other than Nicky "Little Boy" Blue, a man who left Chicago two years ago to track down Vlad Dracula, the Tale responsible for his wife Juliet's death. Oh, yeah, and he's the only man Trish Muffett has ever loved. Awkward!

It's even more awkward when Trish is attacked again, this time in her own home by an obviously pissed off poltergeist, and it's Nicky Blue who once again saves the day - and her sanity - when he shows up in her living room. Wait...Nicky Blue broke into her apartment. When he thought she was sleeping. Uh...yeah, someone's got some serious 'splaining to do.

Teaming up when they discover that the new vamps are Dracula's handiwork, Trish and Nicky race to catch the literary fiend. Whatever his master plan, Vlad is turning Ordinaries and they're killing Tales. He's got to be stopped. Unfortunately, their investigation has them practically tripping over agents from the Agency, the Ordinaries' elite Men in Black squad.

As tensions between the Agency and the FMA heat up and unrest grows in the Tale community, Trish and Nicky have to find the one monster at the center of it all and close his book for good. Unless he ends them first.


My feelings are completely conflicted about this book. I love the world SeRine created with this series, and though I didn't read the second book, I mostly enjoyed the first in the series, Red. This one, despite being an overall better story with a more engaging and complex external conflict, had elements that bothered me a lot while I was reading. And they were pretty important elements, too.

This is one of those books - and series - that walks the line between paranormal romance and urban fantasy. It's a hard line to tread and I've read few that could pull off both aspects with equal aplomb. This one didn't. Not for me, anyway. The first person point-of-view narrative was my first problem. It just isn't a favorite of mine in conjunction with a romance arc. And that romance arc was far more prominent in this story than it was in the first book.

Normally that would be a good thing, but between the POV and Nicky, who I didn't like as a character nearly as much as I did Nate in Red, that put the final kibosh on the appeal of the romance in general.

I don't know what it was about Nicky, really... I liked him just fine as an ancillary character in Red.  As a heavily involved secondary character in this book, he began to wear on me by the halfway point. Everything from his name, which struck me as too-cutesy after being mentioned as many times as one would expect for his level of story involvement, to his very vaguely defined criminal enterprise (I would have liked a lot more explanation about just how criminal that enterprise was), to his odd relationship with his dead wife Juliet and his sudden spurt of emotional connection to Trish, just started to rub me the wrong way and never quite smoothed out for me.

And if he called Trish "doll" one more time, I was going to scream. Suffering through his dialogue was like being dropped into a bad prohibition-era mobster flick. Not my thing.

I liked Trish a lot more than I did Nicky. In fact, I liked her a lot period. She was a little inconsistent at times, and she wavered a bit between take-no-prisoners badass chick to squealy damsel-in-distress, but overall, I found her to be a very palatable heroine. Much more so than Red in the first book. She definitely wasn't the stereotypical, emotional-commitment-issue-having, gun-toting, sarcastic, ass-kicking heroine, a fact that I was most grateful about, but she managed to mostly hold her own when she wasn't screaming or fleeing danger in terror.

Mostly because of her appeal and despite my issues with Nicky, I was very much engaged in the first half of the book. The story started strong and the plot had a lot going on from the beginning. The two main threads of external conflict, the growing issue with the Agency douche bags and the search for Dracula, provided a nice, meaty bit of drama for the characters. Much danger and mystery surrounded it all.

I was about halfway in when I started to feel like the storylines got a little lost. There weren't a lot of answers to be had at that point, just growing badness with the Agency and with Dracula, and Trish and Nicky seemed to be spinning their wheels a little in both areas. The book seemed to lose a lot of its momentum at that point, and I started growing more and more frustrated by some things, most notably the Tales' lack of action against the Agency for some pretty heinous actions.

That was also about the time the romance went completely off the rails for me. Given all the backstory with Juliet and some pretty startling revelations about her relationship with Nicky around the time of her death (which I didn't like for several reasons), I did not expect, nor did I enjoy, the seemingly abrupt about-face in Nicky's feelings for Trish. I just couldn't buy it. Not without a more detailed foundation and or some emotional resolution concerning his dead wife.

And the problems I was having with both the romance and the external conflicts plagued me throughout that whole third quarter of the book. It got so bad at one point that I almost put the book down. Nicky gives Trish a gun as they get ready to walk into a dangerous situation, then tells her to expect the dangerous people they're going to meet to take it from her. When Trish asked a very valid, "well then why give it to me in the first place?" Nicky's response was something along the lines of him wanting to make an impression.

I just stared at that passage for a while feeling not just a little gobsmacked. Because of course, when you're walking into a very dangerous situation to meet very dangerous people, bringing a gun that you know will be taken from you is an excellent idea. Obviously, these people need to have more weaponry at their disposal to end you should your presence miff them.

Brilliant plan, asshole.

I was so disgusted at that point that it didn't matter what happened in the scene they walked into. I was already predisposed to hating it. And that's the problem that I had with that whole middle part of the book.

It got better, though. In fact, it got a hell of a lot better. When the pieces (finally) started to fall together and the answers started coming, the external conflict picked up speed and intensity as the climax approached. I loved the last twenty percent of the book. Action packed, emotional, dangerous, even a little tragic in very surprising ways, the end of the book was definitely a very high point of the read for me.

Therein lies the conflict. There were parts of this book I liked, parts I loved, parts I didn't like, and parts I hated. That definitely makes rating it difficult.

I love SeRine's world of Transplanted Tales. I do. It's unique and intriguing and the characters are diverse and fascinating. I even love SeRine's authorial voice, which resonates with such clarity in the narrative. Unfortunately, I don't always like what that voice is saying to me, and it leaves me feeling very torn about the book and the series both.

Genre: Urban Fantasy Romance
Series: Transplanted Tales, Book 1
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Length: 330 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Kensington Publishing Co. via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.





It was a spell, of course. A spell that went very wrong. Since then, characters from fairy tales and nursery rhymes, literary legends, and fictional creatures large and small have been crossing over into the Here and Now. Most Tales blend in with normal humans, or Ordinaries, with little problem. Some, though, don't do blending so well. For those, there is the Fairytale Management Authority, Make Believe's answer to crime and punishment.

Tess "Red" Little, FMA enforcer, makes her living tracking down rogue Tales and bringing them in to face justice, Make Believe style. She's come a long way since the Riding Hood, which, for the record, she outgrew when she was twelve (and that whole wolf thing was horribly misrepresented, too). Now Red keeps the mean streets of Chicago free from the sort of havoc the less savory Tales can wreak.

It's normally a job she enjoys, but her latest case is striking a little too close to home. Several Tales have been butchered by what appears to be a Tale serial killer, and the FMA's three prime suspects all have one thing in common: a history with Red. And as if tracking down three ex's to ask them if they've torn anyone apart lately isn't awkward enough, she's been partnered with FMA homicide detective Nate Grimm, and the reaper is doing weird things to her equilibrium.

Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed, even if you're fictional.


SeRine's intriguing new series debut may not have been a perfect read for me, but it had enough strong points to appeal. I absolutely love the concept of the world, which in several ways is similar to that of the television series Once Upon a Time. Have no fear, though, this version of Chicago is no one's Storybrooke.

Call me twisted, but I adored the different incarnations of Tales. Snow White? High dollar prostitute. Things with the Prince went south and she got screwed in the divorce. Pied Piper? Exterminator...and registered sex offender. The Sandman? Major pharmaceutical distributor and illegal drug czar. And Mistress Mary Quite Contrary is a prosecuting attorney.

The awesomeness of that alone was enough to push many of my Happy Reader buttons, and the good times didn't stop there. The plot surrounding the investigation into two of Red's cases was solid, if a little light on complexity. I had some problems with a few specific plot points, and there were some elements, like the fact that almost every male character in the book either had sexual history with Red or wanted to, that rubbed me the wrong way, but the execution was smooth and relatively trouble-free.

A few notably rocky places in the plot came late in the book, with twists that felt fairly obvious long before they were revealed, and more than once I felt Red donned the Stupid hat as the story reached its climax, but overall it worked for me. I was less thrilled with Red as the main character. She was fairly typical for an urban fantasy heroine, but that was actually part of the problem, as the book reads like an urban fantasy but tries to pull off a romance.

The leather-wearing, ass-kicking, sarcastic bitch elements were there. She was also a hot mess emotionally. She had commitment and trust issues a mile wide courtesy of a past that was never explained to my satisfaction, and a disturbing propensity for sleeping with dangerous men. One such dangerous man gives her a couple of big happies during the book, and considering he was not romantic lead Nate, those scenes were a huge fail for me and went a long way towards turning me off Red.

Had the reasons for Red's many, many issues been better developed or more clearly defined, maybe I could have accepted them. Instead, they're sort of just thrown out there, remain fairly constant throughout the book, then go through a sudden and unsupported about-face when she realizes her heart belongs to Nate. It made it hard to find her at all sympathetic - or, in a couple of places, tolerable - and as the book is told in first person from her perspective, that's a lot of time to spend in a character's head without caring too much about what happens to her.

For all that she disappointed me, though, Nate thrilled me. I loved his character from the moment he's introduced. I loved his commitment and his understated dedication, his strength of purpose and his endearing kindness. I love that he obviously had feelings for Red from the very beginning, but was always his own man living his own life, even if that meant he was at odds with her. He wasn't the alpha male stereotype, but neither was he ever just an appendage to her life in the story. I just loved everything about him.

Had I been better able to warm up to Red, the good points of the book would have outweighed most of my other issues, but she was just too much of a stumbling block. The good news is that while she kept me from fully embracing this book, this isn't an urban fantasy series with a recurring main character. With the goldmine of story potential inherent in this very exciting world and the opportunity for more unique and engaging characters like Nate in stories to come, that's very good news indeed.

Genre: Romantic Suspense
Series: N/A
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Length: 384 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Zebra publisher Kensington Publishing Corp. via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Little Livvie Dugan remembers a lot about her sixth birthday. She remembers blowing out the birthday candles on the cake her mama got for her. She remembers opening presents, and getting to watch lots of cartoons. She remembers falling asleep in the den with the television on. It was a great day...until she woke up and went into the kitchen for another piece of cake. That's when little Livvie remembers finding her mama hanging by her neck, her face all purple and puffy and her tongue lolling from her mouth.

Livvie doesn't remember much of anything else for a long time after that.

Twenty years later, Olivia Dugan still bears the scars from her childhood, scars that no amount of therapy can erase. They've shaped her into a quiet, reserved woman who stays off the grid, and haunted her with nightmares and a lingering sense of being stalked. Still, she's getting by, until she gets a package from her mother, a package sent two decades after she committed suicide. A package that begs far more questions than it answers and opens far more wounds than it heals.

And when Liv slips out of work one afternoon to pick up a quick bite of lunch and comes back to a bloodbath of mind-shattering proportions, she is terrified that the package from a woman long dead has put her in the crosshairs of a killer. And maybe there is even more to little Livvie's memories of a horrific night twenty years ago than she's let herself remember.


As a twisted, complex, disturbing psychological thriller, this book hits all the right notes for me. The heroine, Liv Dugan, is one of the most damaged and broken characters I've read lately, and as odd as this makes me, I loved that about her. Well, maybe it would be more accurate to say I appreciated it, because she was a quintessential product of a truly traumatic childhood. In short, she was believable in her role, and her manic paranoia and edge-of-sanity actions set the tone of the frenetic race to identify and stop the monster terrorizing her.

There is a lot going on in this book. The timeline is a bit jerky and there are a lot of different characters to keep track of, so some parts were a little hard for me to follow in places. I can't say I totally bought into the introduction of Auggie, either. His behavior wasn't exactly what I'd call professional and his connection to September strained my willing suspension of disbelief. Overall, though, this is a layered, grim, freaky thriller that kept me riveted from cover to cover. And the reveal of the Bad Guy completely blew me away. I did not see that one coming at all.

As out of left field as it was, it completely worked, and all those niggling little bits of seemingly random story detritus so carefully doled out from the very beginning coalesced into a horrifyingly shocking snapshot of insidious evil by the end.  Disturbing, maybe, also effective and intelligently done.

I wish this hadn't been labeled as a romantic suspense, though. For all that Liv was a great main character, and her damage made her realistic and believable, I don't think it made her a great romantic heroine. She was just a little too broken for me to really engage with her in a romantic role. I liked Auggie quite a lot, and I liked them working together, but I kept wishing she wasn't quite as unbalanced as she was, or that the relationship between them had evolved a little differently. I just couldn't get a grasp on them as a couple, not for where Liv was when their relationship started, anyway.

It was the biggest stumbling block of the read for me, and that, along with some of the stylistic elements that tripped me up here and there throughout the story, kept this from being a solid win for me as a romantic suspense. That doesn't diminish my frank appreciation and admiration of the book as a taut, seat-of-your-pants, gut-kicking psychological thriller. In that regard, it's one of the better ones I've read recently, and one I think fans of the genre would enjoy.

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Series: Dark Protectors, Book 4
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Length: 336 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Kensington Publishing via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.



When she was a child he rescued her from a grim fate. Now she's all grown up and its his turn. Problem is, he's being damn stubborn about it.

Skilled hunter and feline shifter Katie Smith has always felt drawn to Jordan Pride, leader of the feline nation, but the man seems to think that just because he saved her from a vile foster father when she was five her feelings are no more than misplaced hero worship. Sure, that might have been true when she was a kid, but she's an elite warrior for her people, fighting on the front lines in a decade-long war against an enemy intent on infecting them all, and she more than knows her own mind. Convincing him of that, however, would be considerably easier if he stopped pushing her away at every turn.

For ten years, Katie has let him, living her life while ignoring the ache of missing him. Then a member of her guard hands her a file containing the latest intel on a newly infected shifter. It'll be her job to hunt him down before the virus turns him into a murderous monster. When she opens the file, though, the bottom drops out of her world, because the picture inside is of a face that's been dear to her heart since she was five years old. Jordan Pride.

Now she's supposed to kill the one man who saved her life and the only man she's ever loved. Yeah...not on her watch. Problem is, she's got very little time to figure out how to save a man who seems determined not to be saved.


I wish I'd found this series sooner, or realized before I started this book that it wasn't the first in the series. Zanetti created a solid plotline for the novel, and the main characters are definitely likable and easy to root for, but much of it is dependent on the surrounding world and previously established history, and it included a large number of secondary characters that were strangers to me. I spent most of the book feeling like I was outside looking in, struggling to catch onto what was going on and who it was happening to instead of feeling immersed in the story.

What made it even more annoying is that it's clearly a damn good series arc with interesting, fully developed characters, and the world they inhabit is rich and complex. I would have loved to have felt more connected to it all. There just wasn't enough detailed explanation of the world or the mythos to successfully allow for that for me, and the story sort of drops readers in and takes off at a gallop, so there just wasn't much time allotted to exposition.

Because of that, my focus narrowed down to the story of the main characters almost to the exclusion of everything else going on. Fortunately, though, I enjoyed the relationship conflict and personal issues between Katie and Jordan, and thoroughly enjoyed both of them as characters. Katie in particular was a strong female lead; headstrong and stubborn, fierce and independent. Though I liked Jordan, too, he had a bit of a martyr streak that got on my nerves at times, so I have to say that Katie was the driving force for the majority of my entertainment with the read.

I did enjoy their romance arc, and the chemistry between them sizzled on the pages. I was a little worried at the very beginning that I would share some of the concern Jordan had about the maturity of Katie's feelings for him and the reasons for them, but Katie disabused me of that idiocy fairly quickly and I enjoyed their struggles, trials, and tribulations as their tale tortures them on their route to their Happily Ever After.

One of the nicest compliments I can give the book is that it reminded me vaguely of Nalini Singh's Psy/Changeling series. Not in story so much as in structure. Both worlds are meaty, complex, complicated places with a lot going on in and around the central plotlines of the main characters, both support a wide diversity of fierce, frustrating, fantastic characters, and each book builds on what comes before. I strongly suspect, had I been with this series since the beginning like I've been with that one, I would be a huge fan of this one, too.

I don't know that I'll go back and try to read the first three books in the series - I have weird series timeline issues that usually prevent me from doing that. What's here, though, interested me enough to continue on with the series. I just hope this one book is enough to ward off the feeling of being on the outside looking in, because really, that never provides for a completely comfortable reading experience.

Genre: Historical Romance
Series: Seasons, Book 2
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Length: 368 Pages
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Zebra publisher Kensington Publishing via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Lord Xavier has never made a wager he hasn't won. This time, though, he's been goaded into a wager with stakes that could cause irreparable damage whether he wins or loses. He's been challenged to invite a proper young woman to his annual Christmas house party. Known for its debauchery and wicked revelry, it's definitely a scandalous place for a young miss. And not only does he have to get a lady to attend, she's got to stay through the duration.

Determined to best the bet and maintain his spotless record, Xavier has to think outside the box. If the lady must stay through his party, then he'd make the party more suitable for a lady. Simple, really.

Or it would have been, had the lady in question not been Louisa Oliver, a brainy little bluestocking who had weathered scandal before and survived. They had a past, in a manner of speaking, and getting her to come to his party and stay for the duration would take more maneuvering than simply making it respectable. For the first time in...well...ever, the only way to secure Lord Xavier's reputation and protect Louisa is to reach past that reputation to the man he is beneath.

When he does that, however, he is forced into a shocking realization: Louisa Oliver is more than a match for both the myth of Lord Xavier and the man, Alexander Edgware. And when it comes to Louisa, all bets are off.


There's something inherently appealing to me about a romantic hero who falls in love with his heroine when she sees into the man he is, not the face he shows the world. Dante-loving, vision-impaired Alex is just such a man. While his Lord Xavier persona is shallowly charming, a touch scandalous, and a bit of a condescending prat, the title has become a velvet-lined prison, so much so that he has almost become completely subsumed by it.

Underneath, though, Alex was a more uncertain and private gent who would rather read a good book than set the ton on its ear with the next bit of salacious gossip. Two sides to the same coin, the one overshadows the other for the sake of reputation and popularity in a world defined by both. He could have annoyed me as character, but I was too amused by the cultivated facial expressions to feel pique at his relentless need to validate his reputation.

Louisa was far more a simply genuine, straightforward character, and I loved her for it. She's my favorite sort of historical romance heroine: intelligent, sharp-tongued, and just a wee bit of a social misfit. I enjoyed her immensely, especially when she was popping pins in Xavier's ego. And she handled herself quite nicely when she needed to with others, as well.

Romain created a highly entertaining and vibrant backdrop for their romance. The two-week Christmas party provided a festive theme and a colorful array of secondary and ancillary characters to meet and enjoy. The plot could have been trite, with the bet setting up a cliched relationship conflict time bomb, but Romain stepped smartly around that pitfall. Louisa finds out about it early in the book so it's a non-issue in the romance, but still a motivating factor in both Alex's and Louisa's actions throughout the story. I thought it was nicely handled all around, actually, especially at the end when the money changes hands.

I did have a couple of issues with the book. Rightly or wrongly, I've gotten the impression from other historical romance that it was considered ruinous for an unmarried young woman of society to spend time alone with a man. Louisa's aunt accompanied her to Xavier's estate, but she and Xavier spent a lot of time alone together. I would have thought that would have been a big no-no. That concern - admittedly, unlearned as it is - niggled me throughout the story and stretched my willing suspension of disbelief a bit.

A larger issue, though, had more of an impact on my appreciation for the read. The dialogue. I don't know if it was a commitment to authenticity in historical speech patterns, or if the dialogue, especially between Xavier and Louisa, was written to be purposely obscure, but it drove me a little nuts. There was so much doublespeak, so much subtext and euphemism, that I had to really struggle sometimes to parse meaning in the conversations, especially between Xavier and Louisa. It significantly slowed my reading and kept me from being able to completely engage with the read.

I haven't read the first book in this series, but the story read fine as a stand-alone historical holiday romance. The main characters endeared themselves to me and their evolving relationship was engaging as the primary plot thread. I just wish I hadn't had to work quite so hard or so often to figure out what they were saying to each other. Even with that issue, though, I felt there were several original and fresh elements in story and character definition. Enough that I'd be interested in following this series as it progresses.

Genre: Paranormal Romantic Suspense
Series: McClouds & Friends, Book 9
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 400 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Kensington Publishing via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Nina Christie has had bad days before. Who hasn't? She never expected to have the concept quite so thoroughly redefined for her, however. Then she was accosted on the street in the predawn hours, a crazed, beaten, and bloody woman calling her name, stealing her phone, stabbing a needle into her arm...

As the world goes dark, confusion and horror clamor viciously inside her. Nina recognized the woman who injected her with whatever was in that needle. But recognition brought no release from dawning terror.

One would think waking up in a hospital, realizing you're still alive, would be a general improvement at that point, but there were a lot of hours left in this particular bad day of hers. With one injection of an unknown substance, Nina has been hijacked from her safe little world, become the hunted for a power-hungry, evil group of people who have deadly, manipulative skills and abilities no human should ever have. And they want Nina dead. Not for who she is, but for what's inside her.

Fighting hallucinations, suddenly hearing people's thoughts, escaping a kidnapping attempt, barely surviving more than one attempt on her life, Nina's reality as been brutally stripped down to one prevalent fact: without help, she's dead. But even when friend-of-a-friend Alex Aaro rescues her from a fate worse than death and agrees to guard her until other help arrives, Nina can't help but wonder.

Is Aaro a grim-faced, aggressive, antagonistic, all around less-than-pleasant knight in shining armor...or is he just another deadly element in a day overloaded with them?


I love to read, and of course I prefer to enjoy what I'm reading, so I can't begin to tell you how annoying it is to realize I've missed out on so many potentially awesome books. Based on how much I enjoyed this ninth (and it hurts me just to type that) installment of McKenna's McClouds & Friends series, I'm going to be kicking myself over this one for a long, long time.

This was such an adrenaline-laced, action-packed, hell of a good time! I absolutely loved main characters Nina and Aaro, the world was well-defined and richly detailed, and the plot was a breakneck race for survival that left me breathless. Some elements were a bit confusing, and the scenes that featured characters who had obviously been previously introduced in the series didn't have quite the emotional impact on me that they would probably have had on a reader familiar with the earlier books, but this still read just fine as a stand-alone.

Not that I'm going to let it stand alone. I have absolutely every intention of continuing on in this series now that I know it exists.

Nina and Aaro were the absolute stars in the story in every way. Not only did I find them both well-conceived and layered, with their own flaws and peccadilloes defining and deepening them as characters, they were also just a lot of fun to spend time with. I was worried at first that Nina would be a bit of a damsel in distress, but she's a real trouper. Witty, sarcastic, and tough when it counts, she comes through nicely. And the banter between her and Aaro was truly classic.

About Aaro...wow...loved him so much. Sexy in that bad boy, alpha male, my-feminine-side-is-a-9mm sort of way, he was all sarcastic aggression, bad temper, and Slavic gorgeousness. Totally yummy and in no way a nice guy, I loved his beleaguered honor and integrity and adored his antisocial attitude. And watching him be floored by his reaction to Nina...that was all kinds of good times. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Yum!

Their chemistry was off-the-charts awesome, but I was so happy that McKenna kept their responses and evolving relationship as organic to their situation as it could be, all things considered. The timeline of the novel is rather brief, and I normally don't have a lot of tolerance for romances that spring up that quickly, but somehow, maybe because so very much is going on around them and happening to them in such a short time, the speed and depth of their feelings for each other didn't feel rushed or unrealistic.

The story itself was just as wild and wonderful as the relationship between Aaro and Nina. I have to admit, the beginning read a little slow to me because the book pulls no punches, dropping readers head-first into the established world. I was confused initially, and it did take me a little bit to wrap my head around some of the critical plot elements and the various factions involved. And frankly there was just a hell of a lot going on in the book with which I had to become familiar. I can't really blame McKenna for it taking me awhile to catch on.

The fact that I was eager to do so in the face of my initial confusion is a credit to McKenna, actually, because had Aaro and Nina not been such strong, compelling characters, I may have put the book down before I had time to get acclimated. I was hooked, though, the first time they spoke to each other over the phone, and on top of my delight over what a bad mood bear Aaro was, my interest in the story was cemented.

This is definitely a book I'd recommend to fans of romantic suspense with paranormal elements. It's a solid installment in a series I plan on continuing, and I'm sure I'll eventually stop kicking myself for missing out on so much of it. Now I know, and after enjoying Aaro and Nina's story I just couldn't be happier about that.

Quotables:

"They're watching us," he said. "They'll follow."

She looked around wildly. "But where? I don't see-"

"Me neither," he said. "I feel them. They make my balls itch."

"Oh," she said inanely. "Must be nice to have an early warning system. Are you sure it's not just a fungus?"

"So people shoot at you a lot, then?"

"More often than I'd like," he admitted.

"Have you considered trying behavioral modification to address that problem?" she asked, a little too sweetly.

He shrugged. "It's more time effective to just shoot back."

He opened the freezer, which was amazingly functional. Some grubbing around yielded a handful of Lean Cuisines. He pulled out five, threw them into the microwave to nuke. "There," he said. "See? I cooked."

"Wow," Nina murmured. "The confidence, the skill, the flair. That was sexy, Aaro. I love to see a guy strut his stuff in the kitchen."

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Series: Guardians of Eternity, Book 9
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Length: 352 Pages
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Zebra Books publisher Kensington Publishing via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




He used to be the Bad Guy. The Big Bad of the piece. Hunted for bad acts, reviled for nefarious plans. Caine was the cur obsessed with becoming pureblood. Narcissistic, lacking conscience. Then one selfless act changed his destiny.

First, it killed him. Which, admittedly, was a bummer. Then he was reborn as a pureblood. Perk. But it also thrust Caine into an unfamiliar role: hero and protector of the most important being alive, the pureblood Were and prophet Cassandra.

Yeah, no pressure there. And that's not all. Caine is having the devil's own time keeping his hands off the beautiful, innocent Cassie. He's supposed to be her guard dog while they bounce all over the country at the whim of her prophecies, not panting after her like a sex-starved pup. That's somewhere he absolutely cannot go, no matter how his body torments him for his restraint.

His yearning is great but the stakes are high. They must focus on the race to stay one step ahead of the Dark Lord. If they fail, if the Dark Lord gets the last living prophet in his clutches, the future will be forever lost to them all.


This installment of Ivy's Guardians of Eternity series provides an example of why I tend to dislike when multiple books in a series have concurrent, non-sequential, or overlapping timelines. I can imagine it's a very tricky thing for an author to pull off successfully because I've read several series that haven't quite managed to do so. Including this one.

The first half of this book, the half that most heavily features the two main characters, Caine and Cassie, details the events leading up to and including how those two characters ended up where they were in the previous book. On one hand, that's a good thing, because honestly, I thought I'd just forgotten major plot points after such a long lag time between when I read the seventh and eighth book. On the other hand, once I realized that wasn't the case, the issue became that I was reading half an entire book knowing exactly how it was going to play out.

Not the details, maybe, but the end result. And that completely stripped any and all suspense or tension from that part of the story for me and made a couple of the elements seem a waste of time.

It did give me a chance to reacquaint myself with Caine and Cassie, which I appreciated. Still, there wasn't enough of what I was hoping this book would offer: a closer look into the nitty-gritty of a fascinating character like Caine. The psychological and physiological effects of the massive paradigm shift and major species upgrade that changed his life offers practically endless potential for character evolution and definition, but sadly I felt most of that potential went unrealized.

I like Caine. I've always liked Caine, even when he was on the less-than-straight-and-narrow, because I understood his motivations, even if I didn't approve of his methods. And remember, I hated Salvatore with a fiery passion (before Ivy made me like him, damn it all), so I was all for anyone opposing the character I thought was a hopeless, brutish thug. I just would have really loved seeing Caine's character go from Point A to Point B with a bit more of a scenic route.

Cassandra had the same sort of take-her-or-leave-her impact on me that she's had since her introduction into the series. I felt her character definition also had potential when she and Caine were in Vegas, but the story focus stayed more on their interpersonal relationship, limiting the page time needed to really dig into defining her as a young woman who's been sheltered from the world for her whole life. I never really felt I knew who she was in any substantive fashion.

Plus, I've mentioned before my preference for strong, independent heroines over damsels in distress, and Cassie was the quintessential damsel throughout almost all of this one.

Once the timeline progressed beyond the events of the previous book, this story picked up for me. I loved how the pieces of external conflict started to come together, building tension and becoming more and more intense. The Dark Lord and his minions stirring up all manner of hell, the efforts of the Vampires, Weres, and all their allies growing more and more desperate as they sustain blow after blow... All of that was great. I enjoyed what was there in the story completely.

My problem with the latter half of the book was not with what was there but rather what wasn't. Namely Caine, but to a lesser extent, Cassie too.

Once Caine and Cassie were in the mist dimension, a place we knew they had been taken as of the last book, Caine's circumstance removed him from almost the whole of the second half of the book and we only got glimpses of Cassie. Not only did that limit the impact of the characters in what is supposed to be their own story, but it completely crippled the romantic story elements for me. And the resolution of the romance story arc just wasn't enough to redeem that for me.

There is a lot going on in this book. Much of the plot-driven, external conflict is a culmination of several books in the series, and it's intense and well written and very respective of the groundwork that Ivy has carefully laid. In that regard, the book was completely successful for me. But it's supposed to be a paranormal romance, and this time there just wasn't enough romance for me to be able to fully enjoy the read.