One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Urban Fantasy
Series: Nikki and Michael, Book 1
Rating: 2 Stars
Length: 368 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Bantam Dell publisher Random House Publishing Group via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.





Private investigator and psychic Nikki James is on a case that's hitting a little close to home. She's tracking a troubled teen for her frantic father, a teen who reminds Nikki of herself at that age, when the girl enters an abandoned house with a serious lack of curbside...or any other sort of appeal.

Nikki can feel the evil that waits within the building, calling to her client's daughter, courting her. It's like nothing Nikki has ever felt before and it makes her want to run screaming in the other direction, but that's not an option Nikki is willing to take. First of all, the girl matters too much to her to leave her to her own bad choices, but there's also another tiny problem with running away; the dark presence Nikki has felt following her as surely as she has followed the teen.

What she finds when she follows after the girl and enters that hellish building, though, will rip apart Nikki's understanding of the world and the monsters in it and introduce her to a whole other level of nightmare.

Michael Kelly was sent to Lyndhurst to save Nikki from the very beast he's hunted for almost a hundred years. Saving her life, however, and using her as bait to catch the fiend, do not have to be mutually exclusive. If he was burdened by a conscience maybe that thought would bother him. If he hated the monster she has managed to stumble upon any less, or been any less intent on ending its blighted existence, maybe he'd let it.


My favorite, and in this case, most applicable, definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That's me when it comes to books by Keri Arthur. I get tantalized by a creative premise or intriguing-sounding characters or fascinating plot ideas and I get sucked into reading them, only to be brought up short by frustrating story elements and disappointing characters. By now I should know that there are just things about how and what Arthur writes that don't appeal to my personal reading tastes and I should leave them alone, but here I am again, drawn back in.

Insanity.

In my defense, I did mostly enjoy Arthur's Ripple Creek series opener, Beneath a Rising Moon, so it's not like I don't have experience with liking her work. Too often, though, I find the sort of things that were in this book: characters who act in ways that don't make sense given what's going on around them and a plot that treads water for too long while the characters slog through a quagmire of angsty emotional dreck that doesn't seem to fit who they are and where they are in their acquaintance. Some of the choices made and actions taken by the characters are just stupid, and some story threads get far more focus than they should while other significant elements go unresolved.

It's a familiar frustration made more untenable by my very hope that this time it would all come together for me. It didn't.

It started great, though. I can't deny that. Nikki's damaged but determined character drew me in and Michael was a dark, sexy enigma who appealed. The case Nikki is working on goes bad very quickly to kick off the plot, and she's drawn into a dark, dangerous reality she didn't know existed. It was a strong, captivating opening.

Then the trouble started. There was a decided lack of explanation for who Michael is, who he works for, and why he's there to save Nikki, but Nikki accepts his oddly random presence with far fewer questions than I would have expected given her inherent trust issues and her own psychic impressions of his character. Convenient for the story's body count, however, she doesn't accept things she should accept later in the story and her stubborn ignorance ends up killing a lot of people and threatening her own life. More than once.

Not that her mistakes ever really blow back on her conscience. She's too busy grinding herself up over the mess she made and the losses she suffered in her distant past...because damage suffered years ago is what's really important when people are dying around you in the here and now as a result of something you did...or didn't do.

Stuff like that drives me batshit.

Of course, if Michael had spent five seconds explaining himself and outlining his reasons, motivations, and plans instead of just pressing Nikki - a complete stranger, really - to blindly trust him over and over and over again, many of the problems in the book could have been avoided. I guess it wouldn't have been very much of a book in that case, but there are other ways to create plot conflict without having characters act with an abject lack of intelligence, maturity, and good sense. As it was, the constant trust tug-of-war between Nikki and Michael felt repetitive and tedious by the halfway point and downright aggravating by the end.

That, along with an egregiously self-involved Nikki during a very pivotal emotional scene, killed any potential for me to have a bunch of warm feelings for the foundation of their romantic relationship.

As for Michael, who's supposed to be an expert on all things Jasper, he had an intensely annoying habit of making assurances and assumptions based on his vast experience with the guy (which, honestly, only seemed vast in years spent hunting, not in actual combative situations). Problem was, he was always wrong. Didn't stop him from the annoying habit, though.

Jasper is too young to stay awake during the day...wrong. Jasper won't attack so close to dawn...wrong. Jasper's not strong enough to take me on...wrong. And it went on and on. It didn't exactly take me long to realize that all of Michael's "Jasper won't" moments were just previews of exactly what Jasper would do next.

I would have beat my head against a wall at that point, but I figured Nikki and Michael would take care of that for me while I was finishing their story so I didn't bother.

The irony (and really sad fact) is that for all the myriad problems I had with this book, I didn't hate it. I didn't like it, nor would I say it was an okay read for me, but I didn't hate it. I actually still really like the idea of these characters and this world, and despite myself - or maybe because of that whole insanity thing - I am curious about what happens next for Nikki and Michael. The book ended with a bit of a cliffhanger in that regard, and though I hate cliffhangers, I wasn't bothered by this one. It felt necessary.

Or maybe by that point I just needed a Nikki and Michael break.

Genre: Paranormal Romantic Suspense
Series: Ripple Creek Werewolves, Book 1
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Length: 368 Pages
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Dell Books publisher Random House Publishing Group via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




When her twin sister is viciously attacked by the werewolf who has slaughtered three women on the Ripple Creek Reservation, Neva Grant vows to kill him. She can't just let the Rangers handle the investigation. She knows from her sister's files that they suspect a member of the Sinclair pack. She also knows that only the alpha's third son, bad boy Duncan Sinclair, has an alibi that elevates him above suspicion. For the murders, anyway.

Neither his past nor his reputation are in any way innocent on any other level.

Now all Neva has to do is seduce the gorgeous werewolf during the moon dance, get access to his home, figure out who almost killed her sister, and end his reign of terror. Piece of cake. Well...at least it's easier than controlling her emotions around the gorgeous Duncan. She's agreed to be his mate through this moon cycle. Rampaging killer on the loose or not, a week of mating with Duncan may be riskier to Neva's life than anything else she'll face.


This is a re-release of Keri Arthur's Ripple Creek series debut, originally published in 2003. I was a little hesitant when I started reading. I knew the werewolf mythos in this book was similar to that of Arthur's Riley Jenson Guardian series, and I wasn't crazy about certain aspects of that in the two RJG books I read. Thankfully, any contentious elements remained mostly in the background in this book.

I liked both Neva and Duncan as the main characters, but I do wish there had been more attention given to their character definition. The romance arc has a heavy sexual element, which was fine, but there was little in the way of significant character depth or romance evolution to balance it out. In fact, the majority of their relationship seemed based solely on lust and physical compatibility as opposed to any deeper emotions or mutual respect, and that doesn't really work for me.

The suspense and mystery story elements were solid, though. The Bad Guy was pretty easy to figure out early in the tale, but I liked that the plotline got richer and more complex, piling on deadly implications and threatening dangers as the story progressed. The scope, motivation, and intent of the murders as well as the intensity level of the investigation kept me invested throughout the book.

I do wish the book had begun at a slightly earlier point in the characters' lives. I would have really enjoyed seeing Duncan in his environment prior to his return, or reading about Neva dealing with her sister's attack as it happened instead of being told about it after the fact. Other than that, though, and beyond a few scenes that displayed some lapses in logic and some rather specious conclusions in the investigation, I liked the werewolf killer storyline a lot.

Equally enjoyable was seeing Neva's relationship with her parents alter in the latter half of the book, and I respected the hell out of Neva when she stood up to her father. It wasn't just what she said, but how she said it that I appreciated immensely. The philosophical differences between Duncan's pack and Neva's pack were fascinating and the subsequent fallout made for some emotionally intense scenes. I would have loved to see that have an even larger role in the story.

The second half of the book was stronger and more enjoyable to me than the first half. Duncan eased up just a little on the alpha male jackassery, Neva established herself more in their relationship, and some of the misunderstandings between them were cleared up. The scenes with them working together to track the Bad Guy were my favorites in the book. The read as a whole may have been a bit uneven for me, but it definitely ended on a positive note.

Genre: Urban Fantasy
Series: Riley Jensen, Guardian, Book 2
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle

3 Stars
Okay, Riley, We Get the Point

Genre: Urban Fantasy
Series: Riley Jensen, Guardian, Book 1
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle

3.5 Stars
Riley's Got As Yet Unrealized Potential

Riley Jensen is a half-werewolf, half-vampire dhampir with a love of her wolf heritage and overall contempt for most vampires. She's a liaison for Melbourne's Directorate of Other Races - an aussie equivalent of the FBI for supernaturals. When a naked vampire turns up in the doorway of the apartment Riley shares with her fraternal twin brother, Rhoan, her life takes a turn from office worker and ramped up party girl werewolf to reluctant...very, very reluctant guardian. But she swears any work even resembling that of a guardian is only to find her brother - a guardian who's gone missing on an assignment - and then to uncover the reasons behind the attempts on her life and on the undead life of the no-longer-naked vampire Quinn, and the mysterious behavior of at first one, then both of her usual mates, Talon and Misha.

At times muddy and plodding, at other times frenetic and confused, Full Moon Rising is a book with flaws. There's a lot going on and the plot more than occasionally gets overwhelmed by the timing of the story. It takes place (unfortunately) during the seven days preceding the full moon, making Riley - the protagonist and narrator - a walking hormone who is genetically obligated to make like a bunny almost continuously until the full moon rises and releases her from the nearly relentless heat cycle.

I could deal with the breadth of her sexual needs, but where I stumbled was in the author's choice to set up those needs as being completely out of a werewolf's control. Given the timing of the badness going down in Full Moon Rising, there are several instances where Riley is left at the complete mercy of her lust, even when the males she's mating with are threatening her life and freedom. That's a little too close to being helpless against sexual assault for my tastes, and it put me off those parts of the book. Not to mention...it seems a little odd that the survival instinct wouldn't supersede sexual arousal, especially in a predatory species. So odd, in fact, it made the story seem discordant in those spots.

That being said, there's potential here. Riley is a competent, intelligent protagonist who stands on her own two feet (or four paws) and doesn't walk around waiting for a male to save her. She's a bit saucy and a bit wicked and she tends to get into trouble...I sure wouldn't let her drive my car...but when she isn't lost to lust, she's a solid heroine. Quinn, the ubersexy and ultra-rich vamp, is probably the most layered and complex character, and I sincerely hope to see more of him in future books. There's a solid group of secondary characters - Riley's vampire boss (Jack) and one of Rhoan's mates (Liander) in particular - who are interesting and sympathetic with a lot of development potential, and the bad guys are really repugnant. The plot itself is interesting, and while there are a lot of twists and turns that clutter it up a little, the ideas are intriguing. I'll be trying the next book to see if the potential is further realized. 3.5 Stars for Riley's first adventure.