One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Series: Dead in the City, Book 1
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Length: 320 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Sourcebooks Casablanca publisher Sourcebooks via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.





Three hundred years ago, Olivia Hollingsworth watched a monster slaughter the only man she ever loved, then was forced to become a monster herself. She's never quite gotten over it.

Sure, being a vampire has its perks, but mostly Olivia just tries to keep her coven, those vampires she's turned and the humans she's saved, safe and gainfully employed at her night club. In all that time, through every thing she's seen and done, with every soul she's saved...one way or another, she has never forgotten the man she gave her heart and body to all those years ago.

For the past two decades, against everything she knows to be true about her kind, Olivia has dreamed of that man. Her Douglas. The one she couldn't save. And then he walks into her club, alive, breathing, and decidedly human, and Olivia's reality takes a quick trip to the land of surreal.

Homicide detective Doug Paxton has a grisly case on his hands, a victim who looks like he was mauled by an animal, the blood drained from his body. All evidence points to the night club near where the body was found. Meeting the owner, however, rocks Doug to his core, because for all that he knows he's never met the deliciously gorgeous Olivia before, he's seen her almost every night for as long as he can remember. In his dreams.

Two souls separated by centuries, divided by more than surface differences, are destined to complete each other in ways neither had ever dreamed. If the forces working against the city's inhabitants and the vampire race itself doesn't kill them both first.


I had some trepidation when I picked up this book. I wasn't a big fan of Humphreys' Amoveo series debut and I was a little worried by this book's title and cover, which gave me the impression of this being a fluffier book than I favor for my paranormal romance. Fortunately, however, that impression was wrong. This is more the sort of darker-edged story that I prefer.

In fact, neither the story nor the characters are anywhere in the vicinity of fluffy, and for almost three-quarters of the book I was highly entertained by the foundations of the gritty world that Humphreys started fleshing out here, as well as the deadly plot and intense characters. I enjoyed the role reversal in the power structure of the relationship between Olivia and Doug. For all that Doug is quite obviously an alpha male, he is human when he's introduced as a character and Olivia is not. She's a former warrior and current savvy business woman, fiercely independent and more than a little jaded about her kind.

She is the power in the relationship and I liked that dynamic between them very much. I was less fond of her three hundred year celibacy, but that was more in how it kept being mentioned. After three hundred years, one would think the subject would be played out, that it would be a moot point, just a fact of Olivia's unlife or whatever, so it didn't feel natural that it kept coming up in the narrative. I get that readers need to be made aware, but a more organic way would have been appreciated.

That was a relatively minor hiccup in my fondness for Olivia's character, however. She's keenly intelligent, loyal to her family, and struggles with the darker side of her nature. I found her interesting and wish the story had provided even more depth to her character, delving into more of her issues with the dark impulses of her kind. She's obviously set herself up as an outsider in her world, and her entire coven are misfits, all survivors of one tragedy or another. I would have loved to have a more comprehensive view of all of that.

With so strong a female lead, I was surprised to find myself liking Doug as much as I did Olivia. Humphreys tread a delicate line in their relationship. Olivia was strong in ways that didn't undermine or contradict Doug's own strength of character, and that thrilled me, but he was also quite endearing, mostly for his butt-over-brains reaction to coming face-to-face with the woman of his dreams. He was so adorably poleaxed by Olivia I couldn't help but be charmed. That he was also a no-nonsense homicide detective with a hella amount of sexy going on just upped his appeal.

Well...I did for most of the book, anyway. My appreciation for Doug as a character in general and as the romantic hero went through a very large change right around the same time he did. Frankly, I thought he was more than a little bit of a douche bag at times in the latter half of the book, and he spouted off some pretty unpalatable plans to address his new condition.

I think I could have accepted that as a part of his character evolution, though, had there been a corresponding evolution of the romance arc surrounding it. As it was, I just couldn't engage in any of the sexy good times between Doug and Olivia so soon after he tossed himself on the not-so-metaphorical pyre and acted like a judgmental, ignorant wanker. And there was a disappointing lack of addressing that issue throughout the end of the book.

Unfortunately, that downturn in the romance coincided with a couple of elements of the external conflict in the plot that didn't appeal to me. For the majority of the book, this was a nicely woven, darkly suspenseful tale with a strong thread of romance tying it all together. Then things went just a step too far down the road of implausible, illogical, and abrupt and I had to shake my head a little.

Beyond my issues with the not-so-fabulously changing Doug, the conclusion to this book was not to my taste. The resolution of several of Olivia's and Doug's life-threatening problems got handed to them on a silver platter that came out of nowhere, and it included some very odd story developments and awkward attempts to hash out a few more quick bits of world building and shady explanation. In a few pages, what had been a dramatic Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads morphed into into a quick, way-too-convenient and tidy conclusion. It was a very uncomfortable deus ex machina that left me feeling confused and a little frustrated.

It was still a better read than I was expecting, though. I didn't have a lot of luck with the Amoveo series. It just wasn't my cuppa, and I was worried this book would also fall short. It didn't, really, even if the ending was too abrupt and clean for me. The larger portion of the book was a lot better than I was expecting and highly entertaining for it all. I may have absolutely no idea what direction the series is heading in - not after that conclusion - but I'd be interested in finding out.

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Series: The Amoveo Legend, Book 1
Rating: 3 Stars
Length: 315 Pages
Formats: Mass Market Paperback, Kindle


Aspiring artist Samantha Logan gave New York City her best shot, but she knew when it was time to pull up stakes and return to her Nonie and her childhood home on the coast of Rhode Island. It isn't just the apparent lack of interest in her art, though, that prodded her to pull up stakes. There are also the dreams...

She dreams of a man who touches her like he knows her, who feels like he belongs to her, and who is telling her it's time to come home.

Malcolm Drew is already suffering from his lack of a mate, a curse for his kind that first limits their power and abilities, then kills them if they don't bond with the other half of their soul. Finding his Samantha in the dream realm fills him with such anticipation and need that he reels with it. He knows she's coming back to the home in which she was raised, and he is anxious to see her in flesh, to court her, and to have her.

Not that he's entirely certain on how to go about doing the courting part. Samantha is a rare and unique woman. Her mother was human, her father one of Malcom's kind, the Amoveo, shapeshifters with a rich clan-like history and special abilities. His problem, Samanatha has no knowledge of her heritage. She was raised by her grandmother in the human world after the death of her parents when she was just a child. Malcolm has never been with a human woman before, or even one raised as human. He has so much to teach her, so much to tell her, and so little time to woo her. But the stakes have never been higher.

A half-breed is virtually unheard of for his people, but she may be the key to their very survival as their existence teeters on a razor-thin wire. Their numbers are dangerously low and mates are growing increasingly harder to find. Being able to mate with humans of special abilities may save their race from extinction.

He will do whatever it takes to have her, to love her, to cherish her, and to keep her safe from the human hunters who stalk his kind and have killed so very many of his kin. Including Sam's own parents.


I wanted to love this book. I really did. Paranormal romance is my reading bread and butter, my favorite romance subgenre. Problem is, Unleashed didn't bring anything new to the table, and what it did bring trod such a well-worn road that the ruts are chasms by now. Everything from the Amoveo's history, to their special abilities beyond shape-shifting into their spirit animal, to their need for mates, to the bond between mates being mystical in nature, to their threatened extinction, to their mortal enemies being a human family intent on wiping them from the earth - just about all of it has been done so many times it's rote.

But here's the catch: it wouldn't be rote if it wasn't such a profitable and commercially appealing formula. See, my problem isn't that the elements of the world being introduced here are so common, paranormal romance wouldn't be my favorite subgenre if that was the case. It's that the commonality was ponderously evident because nothing else about the read was otherwise noteworthy to me.

The characters were okay. Malcolm had that urbane otherwordliness going for him. Personally, I think the author missed an opportunity by not making his attempts at romancing a human more adorably inept to add some levity to it all, but how an author chooses to write her books is her decision. For my tastes, though, Malcolm didn't wow me with his appeal, and he was less alpha male than I like my lead heroes to be. He was...fine, I guess. Nothing about him bothered me, but nothing about him really cranked my engines, either.

Sam was more of a problem, but again, that's a very common issue I have with female leads in paranormal romance. She was a bit too much of a victim, had too many moments of stupidity, or at least thoughtlessness, and wasn't too good at looking around and really seeing the world around her. On a far more positive note, her character did evolve into a far more palatable heroine by the end, but it was a rocky journey.

As a romantic pair, I felt they were, again, okay. They had some chemistry, both physically and emotionally, but it was hampered by how late in the book Sam is brought into awareness of her heritage and identity. Between the ex-boyfriend bully and the stalking predator after her and Malcolm, there were plenty of opportunities for increasing tension and heightening emotion that went unrealized or were underutilized simply because Sam didn't know about it.

The book did have some bright spots, things that added appeal to the read. Some of the secondary characters added a nice bit of color to the tale, especially Sam's best friend and her art dealer. There were also a couple of other Amoveos who peaked my interest. One aspect of the book even gave me hope for subsequent novels.

Despite the fairly predictable and lackluster plot throughout most of the book, the ending had a few twists I really appreciated, hinting at the positive potential for the series as a whole. Once Sam embraced her abilities, once nefarious plots were revealed and secrets uncovered, I was able to smile a bit more about the whole of it. The best parts of the book, for me, were the final few chapters. There was still the patina of familiarity, but the other elements came together in such a way that the patina felt more comfortable than confining.

It's always a good thing when a book ends on a high note. Being the last thing a reader remembers, it goes a long way in making up for what precedes it. Unleashed really needed to knock it out of the park to balance out the lack of sophistication in the narrative, which tended towards repetition in places, the pedestrian worldbuilding and plot, and the prosaic main characters. While I can't say I felt it entirely accomplished that particular goal, it did manage to get on base. There was at least enough there for me to be willing to see how the second book in the series plays out.