Firelight - Kristen Callihan (Darkest London #1)

Firelight is a book that kept catching my eye as it popped up on various to-read lists.  I like Kristen Callihan's contemporary romance books in her VIP series--both Idol and Managed were very good.  If that caliber of writing with a Victorian-era fantasy setting, I thought we'd be good to go.  And the library even had a copy!

The story here follows Miranda, a young woman who has the ability to start fires, and Benjamin Archer, a lord who has fallen under a curse and never shows his face or other parts of his body, instead going about in a mask and dark clothing.  Several years after an initial encounter in an alley, Archer gets Miranda to marry him through coercion.  Despite this, Miranda decides he's hot and that she loves him immediately, no matter why he's so weird--and despite the fact that he might be, you know, a murderer.

And herein lies the root of our problem.  Callihan's contemporary novels have great chemistry and build in the romance department, and that is entirely absent here.  There is no spark between these characters, despite Miranda being literally able to create fire.  There is no sense of fairy tale whimsy or destined or doomed romance, despite the story drawing heavily on East of the Sun and West of the Moon, my favorite of all fairy tales.  And there is no decent-strength fantasy to propel the story in lieu of these other elements.  There is no apparent reason that Miranda has these abilities.  Archer's curse is a mishmash of religions that don't really seem to click together, and seem to have been compiled merely to seem mystical without any thought as to what might actually be behind them.  And his curse doesn't really make much sense, either...  What information we are provided is dumped into our laps in a monologue by one character literally as Miranda gets ready to walk into the final conflict.

I'm not entirely turned off this series.  I do have faith in Callihan's writing skills, and Miranda's sisters have promise as main characters in other books.  Hopefully this was just a bad start to a series, in which Callihan hadn't really fully thought through what she wanted to put forth, and the other ones will be better.  I'll give it another try, but this one in particular was not a home run for me.

2 stars out of 5.

White Hot - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #2)

The second Hidden Legacy book by the Ilona Andrews team picks up about two months after the first, and takes an abrupt turn in direction: from fire to ice.  I was super excited to read this one after tearing through Burn for Me, because I wanted to see the relationship between Nevada and Rogan evolve and come into its own as well as see more of Nevada's wonderful family.  While her family continued to be wonderful and their relationship did indeed evolve, I ultimately didn't find this one as good as the first one.

Nevada is pulled back into the ring of high-stakes investigations when Cornelius, the animal mage we briefly encountered in the first book, comes to her to ask her to take on the investigation of his wife's murder.  He wants to know who killed her, and he wants revenge.  Nevada is reluctant, but agrees, for various reasons.  She's quickly re-enmeshed with Rogan (who has ignored her since the end of the last book) when it turns out that his people were the wife's security team, who were killed along with her, and Rogan wants to avenge them.

Cornelius, while not elevated to main-character status, is definitely one of the primary supporting characters in this book, and that was excellent.  His animal mage powers are vastly different from any of the other ones we've encountered in this world, and they're put to good use in several ways here.  Also, I want a Chinese ferret-badger for a pet now.  I definitely hope he'll continue to be a presence in the third book.  In the supporting character realm, Nevada's family continues to be amazing and we get a glimpse into her origins, as well as the abilities of her two younger siblings and one of her cousins.  This was awesome, and as Nevada evolves into a Prime I hope we get to see more in-depth what her equally-powerful siblings can do.

Nevada's evolution was another interesting aspect of this book.  We knew--or could infer--that she was a Prime from the events of the first book, even if she hadn't come into her own yet.  But here, she's no longer flying under the radar, as much as she might like to be.  She's gathering attention, and it's pretty clear that it's going to come to a head in the third book.  This is a good progression, and I was pretty happy with it.

What I less happy with was the relationship between Nevada and Rogan.  When we left them at the end of the first book, Nevada was attracted to Rogan but unwilling to be just his plaything, and Rogan was attracted to Nevada and determined to have her.  When we rejoin them here, it's all, "I love you!" on both parts, even if the actual words aren't said until later in the book.  Most of Nevada's reservations seem to have just up and vanished, which was very strange, and considering that Rogan's emotional attachment seemed...there, but sparse and under-developed, it seems weird that he jumped so full-on into "I must love and protect Nevada"-mode here.

There's a third book in this series (and it seems like there might potentially be more, but nothing solid so far) and I'm still interested in it, but this was something of a come-down from the first book.  I won't say it suffered from second book syndrome, because that's a plot thing and not a relationship thing, and things definitely moved in this book.  But it wasn't as amazing as the first, and I hope the third can make a come back.

3.5 stars out of 5.

The Broken Girls - Simone St. James

The Broken Girls was my February Book of the Month pick.  Part suspense and part thriller and part ghost story, it was intriguing from the start, following a disappearance, a murder, and a creepy boarding school for unwanted girls in two different time periods.

In the 1950s, four teenage girls share a room at Idlewild, a school for delinquent, disturbed, and just plain unwanted girls.  Katie, CeCe, Roberta, and Sonia all have different backgrounds and different reasons for being at Idlewild, but their shared experience there bonds them and they help each other through the troubles that Idlewild presents, including the specter of Mary Hand who haunts the school and terrorizes its occupants.  In 2014, Fiona is a journalist living in the wake of the murder of her older sister 20 years before.  While visiting the abandoned Idlewild campus, where her sister's body was discovered, she finds out that someone is planning on renovating and reopening the school--plans that go along fine until a body of a former student, missing for decades, appears in a well on the grounds.  Fiona starts digging into the girl and what happened to her, and find some dark secrets lurking in the town and in the past as she does.

This was a properly creepy book.  It's a ghost story, a true one, and while we know all along that the ghost is called "Mary Hand," she's just unknown and distant enough to be truly scary.  After all, the monsters that are the most frightening are the ones we never actually see.  For the less supernatural parts of the story, Sonia's disappearance (because you can figure out pretty quickly that it's Sonia, and so does everyone else) is fraught with horrors of its own variety, the kind that are tied to Nazi death camps, though the strengths of the girls' friendships brings hope--until it doesn't.

As for Fiona and her story line, I really liked it.  She's a reporter who mostly writes fluff pieces but wants to do more, and has the pedigree for it, and takes her chance--both to write a "hard" story and to investigate fuzzy parts regarding her sister's murder--when she gets it.  She doesn't do anything stupid (like charging into dangerous situations) and when trouble finds her, she does her best to deal with it.  I also liked her relationship with Jamie; while they have their issues and the cop/reporter divide is a strong one, they work together and work things out, and I liked how it all unfolded.

Overall, I really enjoyed this.  It is creepy and thrilling all at once, and I was very pleased with it.  The last book I read with a creepy vibe like this was The Night Sister, but that one kind of lost it at the end when the monster became too real on the page.  This one definitely did a better job, and while I think the resolution with Mary Hand was a bit too neat, the rest of it I really, really liked.

4 stars out of 5.

Burn for Me - Ilona Andrews (Hidden Legacy #1)

I picked up Burn for Me while it was on sale a while back because another member of the Unapologetic Romance Readers group had given it a really good rating.  And Ilona Andrews does really good paranormal fantasy with romance elements, which is right up my alley, so it was perfect.  But it sat on my Kindle, unread, until I slotted it into my reading challenge for "A book by two authors," because "Ilona Andrews" is actually a pen name for a husband-wife writing team, Ilona and Andrew Gordon.  This isn't actually hard to find--they're very open with it--but it's not apparent by just looking at the book cover.

The best-known books by these two are the Kate Daniels books.  Burn for Me and the other Hidden Legacy books take place in a different world from Kate's story.  In this world, a substance called the Osiris Serum was discovered in the nineteenth century and unlocked magic in many people; the unlocked magic became genetic, and in our current time, despite the serum no longer being in use, magic is still rampant.  Heroine Nevada has magic that allows her to tell when someone is lying, though she hides it because she doesn't want to be forced to become a human lie detector for the government, military, etc.  Instead, she runs a private investigation business that brings in money for her family.  But when bad boy Adam Pierce starts burning things down in Houston, Nevada is put on the case of bringing him back to his family against her will by the man who "owns" her family for various reasons.  And to make things worse, she ends up falling with bad man Connor Rogan, aka Mad Rogan, aka the Scourge of Mexico, who can literally level cities with just the power of his mind.  Yikes.

I really, really enjoyed this.  I stayed up too late reading it, which I haven't done in a long time, and immediately bought the second volume, White Hot.  Nevada is an imminently likable character.  She is smart and gorgeous and can kick butt, which is all par for the course in this genre, but her devotion to her family is something new, because most people in this genre tend to be orphans or estranged from their families, for some reason.  Her sad and quiet mother, her kooky grandmother, and her annoying-but-helpful younger siblings and cousins were all so charming and really added a lot to this book.  I have mixed feelings about Rogan--and I actually wasn't sure if he was going to be the love interest for a while (I thought maybe something would end up happening with Adam) because he and Nevada don't meet until so far into the book.  But he's a little psycho.  Nevada is keenly aware of this herself, and purposefully keeps distance between herself and Rogan because of it.  But Rogan is the very typical paranormal romance alpha male, and he is determined to have Nevada.  Which really makes her resistance of her, her shutting him down and backtalking, even though she is definitely attracted to him, even more admirable. 

Of course, the fact that this is a three-book series and this is only the first book probably helps, too.  But what's best about this is that Rogan is fucked up and brutal, yes--and Nevada doesn't let him use that as an excuse.  It's not "Oh, he's broken, he will be so sweet and perfect once I fix him!"  Instead, it's "Yes, he's sexy, but he is dangerous and probably doesn't want me for more than sex and I really cannot deal with that now, so I'm going to nope out of here as fast as I can."  This is the type of stuff that strong heroines are made of, and I really liked it.

This is a great, fun, sexy paranormal fantasy/mystery--there's no sex here (though Nevada is interested, somewhat despite herself) and the tension is really drawn out, so don't expect a resolution in that department.  But White Hot is already shaping up pretty well, so I have hopes there!

5 stars out of 5.

Silver Borne - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #5)

Clocking in another book for my 2017 Reading Challenge, I've tackled my third Mercy Thompson novel for the year and the fifth in the series, Silver Borne.  This is a book that was a bestseller the year I graduated high school (2010).  I was actually pretty excited to see this, because books in this vein seem to rarely hit bestseller lists and so seeing it there was very refreshing.

One thing about the Mercy Thompson books is that they seem to pile one right after another.  One book picks up exactly after another one lets off, or at least within a few days of it.  Let me tell you, it must be absolutely exhausting to be Mercy, because she never seems to get a break.  Someone or something is always trying to kill her, and despite her protests that she does nothing to deserve it, she does seem to always be poking her nose in places it probably doesn't belong.  Keeping her head down is not something she excels at.  In this volume we find Mercy, just after the events of Bone Crossed.  Mercy is still settling into her role as Adam's mate in the face of a lot of opposition from the pack, dealing with an increasingly-depressed Samuel, and is also sucked into a missing persons case involving the magical book she's been toting around for several volumes.

I liked this a lot more than Bone Crossed.  BC felt like a lot of politicking and hemming and hawing without much happening.  While this one wasn't full of fight scenes, it still felt like things moved.  Mercy developed in her relationship with Adam and with the pack; there were some pack intrigues, but they didn't take over the book; Samuel started to come into his own and we found out more about his past and his potential future; and the characters overall just seemed more integrated into both the story and the world than wandering around trying to resolve events that really should have been left a few books behind.  All of this was a definite improvement over BC, which was tired in comparison.

This book breathed some fresh air into the series, which I think it really needed.  Fifth books are tricky; by this time, it's either clear that the series should have ended a few volumes ago or that it's good for the long haul.  After Bone Crossed, I wasn't very hopeful, but Silver Borne really brought it back up and gives me hope for a series that doesn't really seem to have an end in sight.

4 stars out of 5.

Bone Crossed - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #4)

The fourth book in the Mercy Thompson series, this one picks up right where the third, Iron Kissed, left off--with Mercy going to accept her position as Adam's mate.  Adam puts a stop to any sexual advances right away, which is good, given how IK wrapped up, and says that she needs to work through some of her trauma before they can become physically involved.  Of course she does this over the course of the one week that this book takes place and they're in bed with each other soon enough (not very many steamy scenes, though, unfortunately; nothing that can compare to Kate and Curran's hookup in the Kate Daniels books, that's for sure) but at least it got off on the right foot?

Anyway, the action here focuses around the consequences of Mercy killing a couple of vampires two books back, despite the wishes of the head of the vampire seethe.  When a pair of crossed bones appears on the door of Mercy's garage, indicating that she is persona non grata with the vampires and is able to be attacked by anything that thinks it can take her, it seemed like this book was going to ramp up dramatically.  Especially when her vampire friend shows up mostly-dead (as dead as a vampire can be) in her living room, her mother appears all primed to be a target, and one of her college acquaintances shows up at her door in a strange state hoping that Mercy can help her with a ghost. 

Unfortunately, I feel the promise fell flat.  Much of the book is taken up with politicking with the vampires in the Tri-Cities and a lurking menace of another vampire up north.  Ultimately, it's that vampire who ends up being the crux of the actual action in the book, revealing some new powers for Mercy and causing some drama, but nothing that has to do with real consequences of her actions.  Instead, everything in the Tri-Cities ends up going about in a hunky-dory manner, which was kind of disappointing given how built-up the drama of the vampire killing and its pending consequences were.  It seems like Mercy got let off lightly--which seems like a strange thing to say, given what happened to her in the last book, but that was completely unrelated to what was brewing with the vampires (who were suspiciously absent in the previous book) and it having pretty much an absence of consequences in the end, other than an exchange of "I don't like you"s with Marsilia, meant that this one felt a bit flat.

Was it nice to see Mercy finally acknowledge her feelings for Adam?  Yes, of course.  And I did like how Briggs showed Mercy wanting to move forward, but in many ways being hampered by her recent trauma.  But while Mercy spent three prior books deciding how she felt about Adam and what to do about him, here she just rushes ahead, and it feels like the pace of their relationship went from one extreme to the other within the span of less than week.  Such a swing didn't seem to fit the book or the series.  Mercy obviously needed recovery time and Briggs wanted time to give it to her, but there was no reason that the follow up with the vampires couldn't have been put off for one more book when they could have been given the drama it truly deserved.  Then this one could have focused more on the Blackwood subplot and maybe been used to make Mercy's proper transition into her role as Adam's mate feel more natural.

I'm not giving up on this series--I at least have to read Silver Borne for a challenge--but this one was something of a disappointment, not living up the previous volumes or the drama that was promised for this particular plot.

2 stars out of 5.

Iron Kissed - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #3)

I'm finally getting back to this series after a hiatus--I have the fifth book slated for a reading challenge category this year, which obviously means that I need to read the third and fourth books first.

Iron Kissed picks up in the wake of Blood Bound, with Mercy basically terrified that the vampire queen is going to figure out that she killed not only the demon vampire of the last book, but the vampire who created it as well.  She's also found herself at a crossroads where she absolutely has to decide what's going to be done about her two romantic interests, Samuel and Adam--which was excellent, because I don't think that I could bear that being dragged out for another book.  This book's central plot gets going when Zee the metal faerie recruits Mercy to help track down someone who's been murdering faeries.  She does, and Zee and another leader of the faerie community go to confront the murderer...only to find him also murdered, and Zee suddenly on the hook for it.  So Mercy, of course, sets out to clear Zee's name, and gets herself into a world of trouble.

I am so, so happy that Briggs finally wrapped up the love triangle here, though I'm not sure that I totally bought into how she wrote Samuel out of the picture love-interest-wise.  Don't worry, guys, Sam isn't written out of the picture; he's still alive, guys!  But Mercy puts off dialing Adam into her decision, though, until it's pretty much too late and some very, very bad things happen to her--things that are totally not her fault, and which Adam realizes are not her fault, but still, not the best time to dive into a new relationship, you know what I mean?

This book is markedly darker than the preceding two, particularly near the end.  It seems like the next one might be pretty dark, too, but if you're here for the pluck heroine who sticks her nose into other people's business, solves the crime, and gets off without any lasting consequences--well, that's not happens here.  Mercy has met her match in more than one way, and she's having to accept help and ultimately come to the conclusion that yes, she has been making some stupid decisions and maybe needs to re-evaluate.  Again, what happens to her is not her fault.  But Mercy does some pretty stupid things in general and really needs to come to a reckoning with that, and it seems like that's coming about here.  I'm hoping it will stick, but we will see.  But again, let me emphasize: this book is much darker.  The climax of the book was hard to read and could definitely be triggering for some, though Briggs does try to keep it from being explicit and in a sort of hazy cloud.  Still, it's very clear what occurs (rape, guys, it's rape) and though Mercy is a fighter, part of what happens to her messes with her way of thinking and is even more problematic for her than the actual rape is.

This was an excellent book; there are some hints at who is responsible, because Briggs doesn't really write in supercilious characters, but it's not screaming obvious.  Yes, the romantic resolution is, in many ways, too easy.  But I don't think that Briggs could have dragged it out longer without losing some people, and having more drama involved with it on top of everything else here would have been too much.  So maybe it's what had to be done?  I don't know...not totally sold, but I'm willing to let it go.

Anyway, I'm still greatly looking forward to reading the next book in this series, seeing how Mercy and Adam tread in their new relationship, and so on--especially as it seems like Mercy's vampire reckoning is finally about to come.

4 stars out of 5.

Queen Heir - Jaymin Eve and Leia Stone (NYC Mecca #1)

Queen Heir was the monthly book pick for the Unapologetic Romance Readers on Goodreads, though it probably wasn't best-suited for the group because it's not really a romance; the romantic interest doesn't even show up on the page until almost halfway through the book.  It focuses on Arianna, one of the heirs of the wolf-shifter queen in New York, who finds herself fighting for the crown after the queen is murdered.

Arianna is pretty much insufferable.  She is, of course, gorgeous.  She has platinum blond hair and gorgeous eyes but oh, her dad might have been Polynesian so she has dark eyebrows and eyelashes even though otherwise she is pale, pale, pale!  She is the strongest of the heirs, has the best familiar (and the only one that is a wolf), is the best at fighting, the best at magic, the best the best the best.  And the only one who can solve the queen's murder!

The writing here is very clunky and the world building is scattered at best.  For example, the authors once use "ferreted" instead of "ferried," and the magic system was apparently created by the Tuatha De Danann, which makes no sense.  Why not, you ask?  Well, for starters, the Tuatha De Danann are a "race" of Irish/Celtic god-like beings, who the authors here instead label as fae.  But they're specifically linked to Ireland.  Here, the authors decide that New York conveniently has a magic system called "the mecca," which again, good job for either mis-appropriating religious aspects or not understanding what words really mean, which was created by the Tuatha De hundreds of years before humans were there and which conveniently aligns exactly with New York's buroughs.  And can be used for teleportation.  Oh, yes.  They also appear to be lumping together the Tuatha De Danann, who are traditionally considered "good," with the Fomoire, who are generally bad.  Either that or they can't tell the difference between these groups and the Sidhe, which are related to but not the same as the Tuatha De Danann, and are more along the lines of what people sometimes call the "Seelie and Unseelie" faeries.  All of this can be gleaned from a quick perusal of Wikipedia, so I'm not really sure there's an excuse for butchering things this badly.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love adaptations of mythology that are twisted up and made new, but most authors at least try to do it with some respect for and understanding of the sources they're pulling on, rather than just going, "Oh hey, that sounds cool, let's do it!" and diving in without any preliminary research or handling source material without any semblance of tact.  Combined with the annoying main character and the sub-par writing, which was also rife with info-dumping, this book was pretty blah.  The pretty cover lured me in, and I liked Kade quite a bit, but I don't think there were enough redeeming qualities in Kade to keep the rest of the series on the top of my interest list.  I think I'd probably be better of going back to the Kate Daniel books for a paranormal romance featuring a sexy shapeshifter.

2 stars out of 5.

Days of Blood & Starlight - Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #2)

I was so excited to read this sequel to Daughter of Smoke and Bone after devouring that first book.  Taylor had built up such a wonderous world and conflict, and I loved the reincarnation premise that the romance revolved around.  It was all right up my alley.  But with so much deliciousness in the first book, I was apprehensive that the second volume would fall victim to the dreaded "second book syndrome."  Did it?

Well...kind of.  This is a book in which not a heck of a lot actually happens, at least on one half the book.  Karou has found a place for the surviving chimera to live, a kasbah in Morocco, and has taken up Brimstone's mantel as a resurrectionist in hopes of reviving her shattered people.  On the other side, Akiva has returned to Eretz and the other seraphim, convinced that Karou is dead after finding a thurible with her name on it in his search for her.  Meanwhile, Karou's friend Zuzana and her boyfriend Mik are in search of Karou themselves, following what they think is a string of clues Karou left in a single email she sent letting them know she was still alive.

There's not a lot of forward motion in this book.  Karou never really leaves the kasbah, and Akiva spends a lot of time pining and talking about revolution before he decides to actually do anything.  The thing is, that didn't seem to actually matter in this book.  Taylor's writing remains so lush and riveting that even though the forward motion was minimal, I kept reading because I wanted to know more about these characters.  And their inner struggles also progressed here; for Karou, she wants to help bring her people back and turn the tide against the seraphim, but becomes increasingly aware of the price that might bear.  For Akiva, it's pretty much the same thing--and so, once again, Karou and Akiva are facing exile from their peoples.  It's a tale as old as time, Romeo and Juliet on steroids, except...well, Karou gets into that "except" herself.  And while this book was a bit slow in overall pace, it was still evenly paced, unlike the first book which had a good first two-thirds and then a lopsided and slow final third.  I was glad to see that more even pacing throughout, and felt that, even though this wasn't a "fast" book, it didn't fall prey to the typical symptoms of second book syndrome.  Of course, everything is still ultimately set up for the third book, which is the fate of all second books in trilogies, and at the end everything has truly gone to hell in a handbasket--but that's for the next installment to deal with.

Overall, absolutely lovely still.  Not quite as vibrant as the first, but with better pacing and still a very solid story, and with a great setup for the third book.

4 stars out of 5.

Dreams of Gods & Monsters - Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3)

I was so excited to dive in to the last book of this trilogy, but also apprehensive, because the second book was not as magical as the first, and I was concerned about the third following in that path.  And there's the rub: I was right to be apprehensive.

With seraphim invading the human world, our heroine Karou and hero Akiva find themselves trying to force the remaining Misbegotten seraphim and a paltry bunch of chimaera to get along long enough to save both Earth and Eretz.  But here's the thing...Taylor can't seem to be satisfied with that as a plot.  Instead, she starts throwing in new ones, like a looming cataclysm and a backstory that hasn't been mentioned until now and worlds-threatening monsters that don't ever actually end up getting resolved.  And while some of this is cushioned by another burgeoning romance between Liraz and Ziri (THANK GOD, because I couldn't put up with any more of his pining) and of course Karou and Akiva trying to come together once again, it just felt like too much, especially because the story didn't really just end, it just kind of trailed off.

I'm not really sure there's that much more to say about this.  There were some excellent moments in here--the confrontation in the Vatican comes to mind, Eliza's return to her true self, Mik and Zuze and the stormhunters as well--but overall I'm not sure they could really redeem a book that felt kind of scattered.  It definitely didn't have the magic of the first book, the snap and sizzle and all of the tropes made over and new again; instead, it felt much more like a generic fantasy story, and one that didn't come to a soaring or even a crashing conclusion, but instead just sort of petered out.  While Karou and Akiva were wonderful and even Liraz got some redemption (but what the heck was up with Haxaya?  Something else that was never explained) there were just too many holes and dropped strings here to make me really like it as a book.  Ultimately, the first book was the best of this series, and it was a bit of a downhill slide from there.  I'm interested in Taylor's more recent book, but this series ultimately didn't deliver what I had really hoped it would.  It read a lot like the upwards-of-a-million-word-long RP a friend and I have had going off and on for years--and while it might be fun to write your own melodrama and jump from plot to plot and have things dropped, there's the potential of it all coming back together again later.  I kept hoping things would come together here, but they never did, and that was a disappointment.

2 stars out of 5.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone - Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #1)

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love.

It did not end well. 

Wow.  Why did I not read this book before now?  It's so cliche, so trope-y, and yet Taylor has a way of writing and bringing everything together that turns what could have very easily been trite into something truly beautiful.

The story here is about Karou, a teenage girl living in Prague and attending art school when she's not running errands collecting teeth for a chimera named Brimstone, who pays her in wishes.  Raised by Brimstone and a band of compatriots, Karou has always felt out of place both in their presence and in the human world.  But one day, while on an errand in Marrakesh, Karou is attacked by an honest-to-goodness angel--and while she escapes, she soon finds herself cut off from Brimstone and the only family she's ever known.

Overall, I found this to be an amazing book.  The magic doors that can open to different locations, Karou's background, the art, the lush descriptions of Prague, her apartment, all of it.  The sizzling chemistry between Karou and Akiva, with a dynamic of "meant to be" that I love to see in books--yes, it's basically love at first sight, but there's a reason behind it.  And I adore the idea of wishes as payment, with the different denominations and such.  For the first two-thirds of the book, I adored this story.  And then Karou found out who she really was, and...the plot just sloooowed.

The last third of the book completely changes tone and pace from the first two-thirds because Taylor suddenly jumps back in time to a "how we got to this point" perspective with Madrigal.  While the insight into chimera society was fascinating, but it just didn't seem to fit with this point in the story and read like a very well-written and rich info-dump rather than as something to propel the plot forward, which is what really should have been at this point in the book structure-wise.  I wouldn't have minded this story line about Madrigal, but I feel like it might have been better peppered throughout the rest of the book rather than dropped in a lump at the end.  It goes back to the "present day" story for the very last bit, of course, and while you can see what's coming, it's kind of this dread sense of hoping it's not what you think it is...but it is, of course.  A terrible ending but also a magnificent one because it sets up the rest of the series for plots of redemption and vengeance and romance, all of which are perfectly delicious in conjunction with each other.

So, yes.  Some pacing problems with how it was structured, but overall a wonderful book.  I can't wait to read the other two.

4 stars out of 5.

The Six-Gun Tarot - R. S. Belcher (Golgotha #1)

For my Popsugar 2017 Reading Challenge, I needed to read a book from a genre I'd never heard of before.  So I started searching for obscure book genres, and something called "weird west" popped up, so I searched for that and The Six-Gun Tarot came up.  Luckily the public library system had a copy of it, so off I went.

It turns out, I have read a weird western before, I just didn't know what it was.  Basically, weird westerns appear to be paranormal fantasy books set in the west, old or modern.  The first one I read, without really knowing this was a genre of its own, was Welcome to Nightvale, which takes place in modern times.  The Six-Gun Tarot follows a similar bend but its set in the years following the Civil War.

The book features an ensemble cast and is centered around the town of Golgotha, which rose up around Argent Mountain, home of both a silver mine and a sinister dark presence.  The town has always been plagued by weird happenings--a bat-thing that snatched people off the street, something that drained animals and people of all the moisture in their bodies, little rat-people.  The people of Golgotha are pretty much used to it, and things are mostly kept in check by the sheriff, Jonathan Highfather, and his deputy, known only as Mutt.  Mutt is half-coyote and Highfather is apparently a dead man whose time hasn't yet come and survived not one, not two, but three hangings and who evidently can't be killed.  Also on the page are Maude, a trained killer who's put aside her training to be the wife of a banker; Augustus, a shopkeeper who's keeping his dead wife's talking head in a jar of liquid in his apartment; and Jim, a young man fleeing the East where he's wanted for murder and who carries his dead father's magical stone eye in his pocket.  All of these people are drawn together around a string of madness, murders, and disappearances that don't bode well for Golgotha, or the world at large.

I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would!  I think Belcher did a great job of weaving together the many characters' stories and building the town of Golgotha.  Totally weird, but with a good explanation behind it.  I'm not sure that the whole God storyline really needed to be included, but eh, it was okay.  Honestly, that seemed to be the least woven-in story, even though it was the background around which the rest of the book revolved.  One thing I do think happened is that Belcher might have tried to incorporate a few too many main characters here.  I like an ensemble cast, but this is a book series and so I think it could have been used to introduce some characters for future books while keeping the core cast smaller.  Not all of the cast ended up being integral to the plot of this book, so I think their dedicated chapters could have been cut and small details about them instead sprinkled throughout the chapters dedicated to the characters who actually were central to this story; then the others could have been further expanded upon in future books.  Because the non-central characters here had a lot of page time, it seemed like they were pushing aside the characters who actually had a bearing on the central plot.

But still, this was a very atmospheric book, and I really liked it.  Unfortunately the library doesn't have the second book in the series and it looks like the third isn't actually out yet, but I'm interested in reading them if it ever comes my way.

4 stars out of 5.

Afterworlds - Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld has some great books.  I loved his Uglies series, particularly the fourth book, Extras, which was an interesting alternative perspective on the world--the main character's story but through the eyes of someone who would typically be considered a minor character.  And so when I was looking for a book to fulfill a reading challenge category for "a story within a story," Afterworlds seemed to be an obvious selection.  Half of the book is about Darcy Patel, a teenager who's just scored a huge publishing contract for a book she wrote during National Novel Writing Month (though the event itself is never referred to by name)--and I mean a huge publishing contract.  Three hundred thousand dollars of a publishing contract for the book and its sequel.  The other half of the book is Afterworlds, Darcy's book, itself, about a girl named Lizzie who survives a terrorist attack by thinking herself dead, and then finds out she's been transformed into a psychopomp/valkyrie/grim reaper type of being along the way.

Both halves of this book are intriguing in and of themselves, but I'm not sure they work as a coherent whole.  On one hand, Darcy is going through a rewriting process for much of the book, so we get to hear what the inner story was like before it becomes the version we read, which is an interesting dynamic.  But on the other hand, fitting both stories into a normal-length book means that neither really feels like it's getting fleshed out or is as interesting as it could potentially be.  For example, there's not much that actually happens in Darcy's own story.  She moves to New York, eats, writes or avoids writing, and begins a relationship with another Young Adult author, Imogen Gray (more on this later).  But that's pretty much it.  Darcy doesn't actually do a ton of growing throughout the book, and her part actually felt like it was giving aspiring young authors extremely unrealistic expectations of how writing and selling a book works.  A first-time author getting a six-figure advance for a book?  Hm...seems unlikely.  As did everything that followed.  The parts that felt the realest were Darcy's travails, but they're frequently overshadowed by her new and glamorous New York Life which...doesn't really seem like it's how it would work...

For the Afterworlds story, it's really only half a story, which is part of the problem.  Part of Darcy's task is to write a sequel to Afterworlds, but Westerfeld himself actually hasn't and doesn't appear to have plans to do so, which means that Lizzie's story just kind of stops with a lot of threads unresolved.  Additionally, there's a relatively dark story line at the center of Lizzie's story about her seeking justice for the ghost of a little girl, which results in terrible actions on Lizzie's part, but the seriousness of these are never really addressed, she gets off without any big consequences, and there doesn't even seem to really be a permanent affect on her character, which was rather disappointing.  And while the version of Afterworlds that we read is supposed to be Darcy's finished product, after her edits and re-writes, some of the issues that her editor mentions linger on, almost making it seem like a caricature of itself at some point.  I think a full-length Afterworlds would have been fascinating and probably a best seller in and of itself, but mixed in with real-world Darcy's story, it just doesn't mesh well enough.

That said, there are some high points here.  There's some really good advice for aspiring writers woven throughout, especially regarding story structure, that's likely to make anyone working on a first draft re-think about how things should be set up.  And then there's Darcy and Imogen themselves.  They have a wonderfully sweet and supportive relationship, even when they have rough patches.  Darcy's family is also ultimately so supportive of her relationship--not knowing that Darcy liked girls before she moved to New York, since even Darcy herself hadn't been sure.  But Westerfeld doesn't try to turn this into a book about "discovering one's sexuality" and doesn't turn to the trope that so many authors do that a gay relationship automatically fails to add #drama.  I think it was well-done and it's balanced by Lizzie's straight relationship with Yama in Afterworlds in a sort of contrast...especially because Lizzie and Yama's relationship is the one with dark tones to it.  It was also fun wondering what parts of characters Westerfeld might have incorporated from other authors of his acquaintance, and what titles and story ideas that have been discarded over time made appearances in the book as other authors' stories.

Overall, this was an enjoyable read but I don't think it was an excellent one.  Neither part of the book was really enough on its own, and it kind of felt like Westerfeld had two half-done ideas so he decided to combine them rather than digging into expand either one into a full-length work of its own.  But I got to read it for free on Riveted, where it was featured for part of April, so I still think it was a worthy use of time.

3.5 stars out of 5.

Dark Lover - J. R. Ward (Black Dagger Brotherhood #1)

Vampires are not my thing.  They never have been.  But there's a category for a vampire romance in the Unapologetic Romance Readers' 2017 reading challenge, so I perused the lists of vampire romances that people love, and Dark Lover basically topped them all.  And so off to the library I went.

This book is...interesting.  On one hand, the romance is mostly okay, so that's a plus.  On the other hand, everything else is so harebrained and way-out-there crazy that I couldn't help but giggle to myself the entire time I was reading this.  It starts on the very first page when the heroine's father, Darius, is trying to get one of his buddies to agree to help Beth (the heroine) through her upcoming change into a vampire, as she is unaware that she's half-vamp.  The buddy's name?  Wrath.  And there are more of them!  Tohrment.  Rhage.  Vishous.  Zsadist. These are really their names.  And of course they all dress in black leather and carry around an entire armory with them.  And they can teleport!  Yes.  It's true.  And they inhabit some vampire society in which females are kept out of sight, which is totally weird and very medieval.  Not cool.  And apparently vamps can only actually feed on each other for real nourishment, not humans?  But that doesn't make any sense.  (Yes, I'm talking about vampires making sense.)  Because then it's just kind of an endless circle of sucking on each others' wrists/necks/whatever, without any new nutrients actually entering the system?  How does that work?  So confusing.  So weird.  And Wrath is apparently blind but he never actually has any trouble seeing things except to cut up his meat at dinner(because vampires eat normal dinners, too).

But, as I mentioned, the romance is okay.  It's not great.  There are definitely still issues with it.  Like how Wrath is supposed to be the biggest, baddest vampire, but turns into a cuddly puppy as soon as Beth enters the picture.  And how Beth and Wrath fall in love pretty much the instant they lay eyes on each other, and instantly do the sexing.  Okay, I take it back, the romance wasn't really that good.  It had its moments, when the two of them were acting relatively normal, but the premise that their relationship is based on is just so weird that, the more that I think about it, the worse it seems in retrospect.  Like, Wrath was her dad's friend.  And he's like four hundred years old!  Why is it that beings that are centuries old are constantly falling in love with twenty-somethings?  That's just weird, y'all.  Talk about an age gap.  And Wrath acts like he's twenty-something, too, down to the way he dresses and talks, despite the fact that he's literally seen centuries go by.

Oh, and there's a subplot that revolves around a bunch of soulless and undead humans who study martial arts (yes, seriously) trying to kill all the vamps.  (Again--seriously.)

So, yeah. This book was hokey.  I enjoyed parts of it while actually reading it, but looking back on it, those parts are fading away fast, because the more I think about it the more outlandish and bizarre it all was, and I can't really say that it was good.  Overall, this reads like something a teenage goth would have written on Quizilla in the early 2000s, though this admittedly probably has better spelling and grammar and isn't written in the second person.  (Thank the stars for that.)

2 stars out of 5, and I feel like that might be me being generous.

Chasing Ghosts - E. A. Copen (Judah Black #3)

These Judah Black novels are some of my favorite paranormal fantasy ones right now.  They follow the eponymous Judah Black, a federal paranormal enforcement/regulatory/investigative agent who lives and works on the paranormal reservation of Paint Rock in Concho County, Texas.  She has a "real" job and a son, and now she even has a boyfriend--the werewolf Sal, who lives next door and is part of the local pack, and who Judah kissed in the last book, which I guess makes him her boyfriend even though they never actually discussed anything or went out and just kissed once during a fight?  I dunno, that seemed kind of strange--I love some romance in a book, but there seemed to be a leap here that didn't really connect properly.

Anyway.  this book picks up immediately after the last one.  Judah is told by local vampire higher-up Marcus Kelley to investigate a paranormal illness plaguing a toddler--said toddler being the daughter of wendigo Zoe, featured in the first book.  And it turns out that the little girl's father isn't another wendigo, as Judah had thought, but Sal--because Zoe is Sal's ex-wife.  Oh boy... She wants to tell Sal, but also doesn't, because it's kind of Judah's fault (a little) that this situation happened, and she's afraid that it'll drive him away.  Meanwhile, she also tries to balance her new relationship with Sal with his involvement in a biker club of questionable legality and with her son Hunter.

While Hunter was an integral part of the first book, he continues to be shoved aside in this one, constantly left with minor side characters or even stuck in a hospital room, unconscious.  Though Judah is a busy woman, it does rather feel like Copen didn't know what to do with a kid in this situation, so she just sidelined him.  How Hunter was actually a character in the first book was one of its big draws to me, so I'm extra disappointed to see the sidelining of the second book continued here.

The plot itself also wasn't as compelling to me.  Copen used this as a "relationship" book, and it felt like that came at the expense of a strong central plot, which doesn't have to be the case--you really can have both!  But the main plot and the "big bad" here seemed, for the most part, pretty apparent from the beginning.  There were a few minor surprises that popped up, but nothing that really made my jaw drop or made me re-examine other parts of the book.  It was more like, "Ah, yes," moments, than "Aha!" moments, if that makes any sense.  I did, however, like the integration of the spirit world and how Marcus and his family played into the plot here.  It made him much more "human," for a vampire, and also gave me a much better understanding of how vampires work in Copen's world.  So that was very well done.

Overall, I liked this, but not as much as the previous books.  I do think that, now that Copen's got some of the relationship stuff out of the way (I say relationship and not romance, because it's not really a romance at all) she might come back with a stronger focus and better balance in the next book.

3 stars out of 5.

Blood Bound - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #2)

Let me tell you, the covers of this series drive me crazy.  No one dresses like that to fix cars OR to fight evil.  Since this is a series that's pretty clearly aimed at women, I am baffled that it's marketed so blatantly to men in the cover department.  But I picked it up anyway, because it was available from the library, the first one was okay, and I needed a paranormal romance title for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' 2017 Reading Challenge.  (For more information about that challenge, you can check out our forum here.) 

This book finds Mercy repaying a favor she owes the vampire Stefan, and getting mixed up in the hunt for a demon-possessed sorcerer in the process.  Meanwhile, she tries to balance Samuel, her werewolf roommate who she was at once point in love with, and Adam, the sexy werewolf Alpha of the local pack.  And there are definitely some indications that Stefan might have some romantic feelings towards Mercy, too.  Hm... I'm not sure how that works, being as Briggs has pretty clearly laid out that vampires in her world really are dead, but I guess it does, somehow.

Anyway, I do like Mercy as a heroine.  She recognizes her strengths and weaknesses, and she does her best not get in the way when she realizes that something is above her abilities.  Does she ultimately get involved?  Yes.  But she does it only when she sees that she's uniquely suited to solving the problem and when pretty much everyone else qualified to go in on it has either been devoured by it, or refuses to get involved...and when everyone she loves seems to be in danger.  She's also doing her best to figure out the Adam/Samuel thing without unnecessarily hurting anyone or having to give up any of the things that are important to her.  The way she and Adam interact is absolutely delightful.  They banter, they annoy each other, they sometimes infuriate each other, and yet they also want to kiss each others' faces off at the same time.  Adam had claimed Mercy as his mate prior to the series starting, supposedly to keep her from getting in trouble with the other wolves, who would otherwise kill a coyote shifter like Mercy--and yet those very wolves seem to recognize her authority as his mate anyway, indicating there's probably something more there.  Very interesting...

The romantic tension isn't resolved here, and the main plot is bloody.  Very bloody.  It's indicated that probably forty more more people have died by the time it is.  In the process, Mercy gets pretty messed up and also opens a door that can't be closed, hinting at a lot of turmoil involving vampires in the very near future.  It's hard to say a lot more about this without involving a lot of spoilers, but suffice to say that I really liked it, and it definitely intrigued me to read more of the series, much more so than the first book did.

4 stars out of 5.

Silvern - Christina Farley (Gilded #2)

Silvern is the second book in Christina Farley's Korean YA fantasy trilogy, which began with Gilded.  The main character is Jae Hwa, an American Korean who has moved to South Korea with her father for his work a few years after the death of her mother.  In the first book, Jae Hwa broke a curse on her family that had doomed generations of women to death at the hands of the demi-god Haemosu.  Now, just when she's starting to think that life might get back to normal, she finds out that the god of darkness, Kud, wants her to find the White Tiger Orb, one of the six that are supposed to protect Korea, and bring it to him...or he'll kill her friends and family.

This was not a good book.  This series had a lot of promise in the beginning and while the first book had its issues, the promise of a non-white MC, Korean mythology, etc. made me want to read this second volume.  I finally got around to it (despite having owned it for a long while) because it has a tiger on the cover and I needed a book to fulfill my 2017 reading challenge category of, "A book with a cat on the cover."  I went into it with high hopes, but found myself so terribly disappointed.

In theory, Jae Hwa should be an awesome heroine.  The book starts with her preparing to get her second-degree black belt in tae kwon do.  She lives in Korea and has killed a demi-god and is kind of mistress of his realm now.  So cool, right?  But her martial arts trend toward descriptions of back flips and cartwheels--which, of course, are terribly efficient modes of transport, much more so than, you know, running--and flying kicks which would be more at home in a bad martial arts movie than in any sort of efficient fighting scenario.  She can shoot a bow but she never has it with her when she needs it.  (This is probably semi-excusable, because walking around with a bow in modern Korea all the time would be a bit weird, but still.  One would think that if one was being stalked by murderous magical creatures, one would pass up being weird for being prepared, at least some of the time.)  And on top of my frustrations with Jae Hwa, the plot itself is just whack.

See, to get this mysterious orb, Jae Hwa has to go to North Korea.  Yes.  North Korea.  And she convinces her school to send her, along with her best friend, boyfriend, grandfather, and another young member of her grandfather's secret society, who, by the way, is also putting the moves on Jae.  Hmmm...  Can this possibly go well?  No.  No it cannot.  Even the thinnest veil of logic is missing here--this is a school trip, supposedly, but fully half its members do not belong to Jae's school.  And Jae's father, who believes his daughter to be mentally unstable, agrees to it.  What?  He doesn't like it, but he still lets her go.  As an American.  To North Korea.  Ugh.

And then there's the pacing, which is entirely off.  There are chapters where different creatures are attacking Jae & Co. every two paragraphs, and then long stretches of chapters where she and her friends do nothing but plan parties or read books.  It's very uneven, stacked in some places and lacking in others.  I thought that an interesting love triangle might actually liven things up here, but that clearly didn't go as planned, so that ended up being a no-go, too.  Ugh.  The end of the book has a bit of promise, but honestly I can't go through another book of this stuff, so I don't think I'll be reading it.

I'll give it 2 stars out of 5, but it's more for the promise it displayed than the actual delivery.

Magic Bleeds - Ilona Andrews (Kate Daniels #4)

Magic Bleeds is the fourth Kate Daniels book by Ilona Andrews, and it takes place a few months after the third book, Magic Strikes, when Kate is supposed to cook Curran dinner naked because she lost a bet with him in the third book... Oops.  However, dinner doesn't go as planned and the timeline jumps a few weeks to Kate, being mopey but still doing her job as a supposed go-between for the Order and the Guild.  She immediately encounters trouble, of course, but this time it's in the form a guy who's spreading a plague, despite the fact that he's dead and nailed to a telephone pole.  Whaaaaat?

This is another book that had some interesting components, but the plot was a bit all over the place.  The book starts off with the problem of mysterious cloaked figures spreading various plagues across the southern US, and then suddenly changes track and goes off on a mysterious cloaked figure with seven mysterious cloaked figure henchmen, all with different abilities, and none of them actually appears to be geared at spreading plague.  So that's kind of weird.  Again, Andrews tries to tie all the mythology together (this time the "flavor of the book" appears to be Mesopotamian) but I'm not completely convinced.  Both of the plots seemed interesting on their own (I definitely thought there was going to be a Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse vibe going on, but nah) but seemed to fall apart a bit when they got tied together.  The cool part was that we get to meet Kate's (gasp) aunt!  Who we've never heard of until this point!  Okay, that seems like it was a little bit "made up in a hurry" for this but I really liked Erra despite her being, you know...evil.  I actually wish she could have stayed along longer because I loved her so much.  Other things to like are more of Dali (and is there something between Dali and Jim?!?!) and, oh yeah, the whole Kate/Curran thing finally coming to a head.

But there's something weird about the Kate/Curran thing, too, and that's that as soon as they're together, they (for the most part) stop butting heads.  Before, they were at each other's throats every two seconds, and not in a sexy way.  But they have sex and then suddenly they're all goo-goo over each other?  It didn't seem to fit, and you can't convince me that all of their previous head locked moments were due to the now-relieved sexual tension.  I just won't believe it.  I like the part at the end, with Kate at the Keep, but that seemed to work mainly because Curran wasn't really present for it.  While I appreciate there finally being movement on this front, it's also frustrating to see the dynamic of the relationship apparently change drastically just because they got naked together.  Possible?  Yes... Likely?  No.

This was another "fun" book and I did really enjoy it, but I don't think it's quite as strong as its predecessors in the actual story.  However it does make up some of that in the romance department, so I'll give it 3.5 stars out of 5.

Alpha & Omega and Cry Wolf - Patricia Briggs (Alpha & Omega #0.5 and #1)

I'm combining two reviews here, because I think it's really necessary.  Continuing on my quest for a good paranormal romance novel, I found Cry Wolf on several lists, though usually several slots below Brigg's other series start-off, Moon Called.  CW takes place in the same world and on the same timelines as MC.  But when I started reading it, I immediately realized that I was missing something.  Which doesn't seem right, does it, given that CW is the first book in its series?  Well...not really.  See, there's a novella that comes before, and it's integral to understanding what the heck is up with this book.  Because if you just start in on reading MC, then you're suddenly dropped in the middle of something that's going on.  I was very disoriented, and I can't imagine anyone else wouldn't be.  I really disagree with this approach, and feel like the novella, Alpha & Omega, should have somehow been integrated into the body of the book.  Because while the book itself is easy to find, it's much less easy to find random novellas that float about, and it means that a lot of readers probably go into this unprepared.

Reading A&O and CW as one work instead of as separate ones, I liked this a good deal more than I liked MC, which I'd read the previous day.  There's more of a romance line here, which is important to the main character, Anna's, development.  See, Anna was part of the Chicago pack that was causing problems in MC, having been a werewolf for three years after she was turned against her will.  She was the lowest member of the pack, being repeatedly abused and raped on the orders of the pack's leaders.  When Charles, the son of the lead of all werewolves in North America, shows up to deal with the pack, he quickly finds himself paired up with Anna, and immediately decides she's his mate.  Anna isn't entirely opposed to that, for a variety of reasons, but she keeps her walls up and is slow to let them down even after she decides that being Charles' mate is what she wants.

The romance takes up part of A&O and about the first half of CW.  As CW gets started, Anna and Charles are headed back to Montana, where Anna hopes to start a new life but finds herself on uncertain ground with the Marrok's pack despite her special status as an Omega.  But her stay there doesn't last long because she and Charles quickly find themselves dispatched to take care of a rogue werewolf who's been killing people in the nearby mountains.  The trip works to help Anna gain a better sense of understanding, both of who and what she is and where she stands, with Charles and with others, and start to repair some of the damage that was done by the Chicago pack.  But still... Her "moving on" seems to happen remarkably quickly.  While I enjoyed the progress and the pacing, I still found myself being very skeptical that Anna would so quickly find herself being comfortable in her new situation when she was repeatedly raped and abused in her previous pack.

Still, Charles was an excellent hero, and the supporting characters here were excellent.  Wallace was cool, Asil was awesome, and while Briggs continued to have a thing about bitchy women, she at least integrated one other good female, Sage, who I would love to have seen more of.  The plot here was also much stronger, consistent, and less twisted in on itself than that of MC, which I appreciated.  But the romance was one of the compelling parts of this story, and it's neatly wrapped up by the end of the book, so while I liked these characters I don't feel super compelled to read the future ones.  Still, I think this was a big step up from MC and it deserves a better rating as a consequence.

4 stars out of 5.

Moon Called - Patricia Briggs (Mercy Thompson #1)

On my search for a good paranormal romance, Patricia Brigg's Moon Called showed up at the top of many lists.  So, of course, I got it from the library.  Well, Mercy is an interesting character (who does not dress anything like the woman on the front on the book, btw, being more sensible than that) whom every male she encounters wants to have sex with, and yet this still avoids being a paranormal romance.  Presumably this is at the top of so many lists because it sets up for romance later in the series, but I still feel terribly misled by those list-creators.

Putting that aside, let me talk about the book itself.  Mercy Thompson lives in Washington state where she owns an auto shop and tries to avoid too being found out as a skinwalker.  In Mercy's world, "lesser" fae have been forced into the public eye by their leaders/overlords the Gray Lords, but other supernaturals such as vampires, werewolves, and Mercy herself have managed to remain out of sight and out of mind--at least for now.  But when a young werewolf shows up at Mercy's shop looking for a job, it sets off a chain of events that might hint at the end of this secrecy, or something even more sinister.

Mercy has an interesting past.  Despite being a skinwalker, she was raised by werewolves, and not just any werewolves but the pack of the leader of all the werewolves in North America.  She left them when she was a teenager and hasn't been back since, but that's another area she gets pulled back to when the leader of the local pack, who is also Mercy's neighbor, is almost killed and his daughter kidnapped.  So Mercy heads to Montana, and then back to Washington in the company of not only Alpha Adam, but her old flame and the son of the werewolf leader, Samuel.  Both of whom, of course, want to get in her pants.  Sigh.

I liked Mercy and I liked Samuel and Adam, despite their constant posturing over her attentions (which she doesn't really deign to give).  I found the lack of other compelling female characters strange; all of the females in the pack she grew up with hate her because apparently she can have children and they can't, which is female bitchiness at its best.  Jesse, Adam's daughter, is great but gets very little page time being as she's, you know, kidnapped for most of the book.  And while I liked the beginning of the plot, by the end I found it had wrapped itself up into a convoluted mess.  "Convoluted" is actually a word Briggs herself uses to describe the plot in another book, which is maybe an indication that it should have been set out a little differently.  Everyone seems to flip-flop on what's happening so many times that even when they laid it out in the end, I wasn't entirely convinced as to what was actually going on.  And ultimately, I don't think this book was memorable.  It's kind of another generic paranormal mystery and didn't really leave me dying to know what comes next for Mercy or her harem of would-be-lovers.

3 stars out of 5, and I don't think I'll be picking up the next one any time soon.  This just isn't what I'm looking for in a paranormal series.