Monthly Archives: September 2019

Book Review of Into the Mist (Falcon Mercenary Group #1), by Maya Banks

I borrowed a copy of Into the Mist, by Maya Banks, through Hoopla.

Description from Goodreads:

Hostage recovery specialist Eli Chance has a secret. He was born a shifter. A freak of nature.

While on a mission, Eli’s men and their mercenary guide are exposed to a powerful chemical agent, and suddenly his secret has become easier to hide. Now he’s not the only one with the gift. But for his men, this “gift” is becoming more and more of a curse.

Tyana Berezovsky’s brother Damiano was the guide for Eli’s team and was the worst affected by the chemical. As he grows increasingly unstable, Tyana fears she’s going to lose him to the beast he is becoming.

Tyana will do whatever it takes to help him, even if it means using her body to go after the one man she thinks holds all the blame—and possibly the cure. Eli Chance.

Review:

Anyone who has read my reviews very often will have come across at least one in which I’ve said that I used to think I hated the romance genre and refused to read it. Then, one day, I Realized that it wasn’t actually romance I hated but the gender representations common in romance books. I’ve learned that if I’m selective, I can quite enjoy romance.

Into the Mist is not one of those books. It is full of all the gendered BS that I hate and avoided for so very long. Tyana is supposed to be strong and talented and skilled, but she’s a walking disaster of TSTL. Her primary character development is being a rape victim as a child. And sadly, that’s more than anyone else in the novel gets.

The paranormal aspects of the book are so sketchy and poorly thought out that I finally just decided that they’re there as window dressing to world the characters live in. And that world is so ill-defined that I didn’t even know if shifters were out or not. So, basically the world existed simply to give the characters different places to have sex. And the sex wasn’t even that hot.

All in all, as my first Banks book, I was disappointed. Additionally, the narrator did a fine job. However, I hated the fragile, breathy way she played Tyana. It only exacerbated my frustration with the book.

Book Review of Extreme Medical Services, by Jamie Davis

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I borrowed an audio copy of Jamie Davis‘ Extreme Medical Services through Hoopla.

Description from Goodreads:

Monsters, Paramedics, and Street Medicine.
New paramedic Dean Flynn is fresh out of the academy. When he gets assigned to the unknown backwater ambulance Station U, he wonders what he did wrong. Then Dean learns that his patients aren’t your normal 911 callers. Dean and his partner Brynne Garvey serve the creatures of myth and legend living alongside their normal human neighbors in Elk City. With patients that are vampires, werewolves, fairies and more, will Dean survive his first days on the new job? Will his patients? Not all is well on the streets of Elk City either, and some humans are striking out at their mythical neighbors. Dean soon finds himself in the middle of a series of attacks on his patients, attacks that implicate a former member of Station U.

Review:

I’ll grant that this is well written. Mechanically it feels solid. However, it’s obvious that the author is (or has been) a paramedic, and probably a trainer. Listening to this book was more like sitting through a ‘How to be a proper, empathetic EMT’ than an urban fantasy. Unfortunately, I signed up for a fun fantasy ride, not a didactic sermon (or ten). You might think using all the correct words for things would be a good thing, but coming across things like capnography dropped in casually was a distraction. And there is A LOT of that sort of thing. Worse for the audio version, Scarlato (who did a great job otherwise) wasn’t quite able to make the strange words roll off his tongue. There was often a micro-pause before. So, they stood out even more.

Basically I was bored for most of the book. The vast majority of it is just descriptions of what the ambulance crew do on their runs, with no actual plot. Then, in the last 10% or so a plot finally developed. But apparently it was only being introduced for the next book, which I don’t think I’ll be reading.

Again, it’s not necessarily bad. It’d probably be a great way to get new emergency services students used to some of the ideas. But for the average reader………

Book Review of Deadmen Walking (Deadman’s Cross #1), by Sherrilyn Kenyon

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I borrowed a copy of Sherrilyn Kenyon‘s Deadmen Walking through Hoopla.

Description from Goodreads:

Deadmen tell their tales . . .

To catch evil, it takes evil. Enter Devyl Bane―an ancient dark warlord returned to the human realm as one of the most notorious pirates in the New World. A man of many secrets, Bane makes a pact with Thorn―an immortal charged with securing the worst creations the ancient gods ever released into our world. Those powers have been imprisoned for eons behind enchanted gates . . . gates that are beginning to buckle. At Thorn’s behest, Bane takes command of a crew of Deadmen and, together, they are humanity’s last hope to restore the gates and return the damned to their hell realms.

But things are never so simple. And one of Bane’s biggest problems is the ship they sail upon. For the Sea Witch isn’t just a vessel, she’s also a woman born of an ancient people he wronged and who in turn wronged him during a centuries long war between their two races―a woman who is also sister to their primary target. Now Marcelina, the Sea Witch, must choose. Either she remains loyal to her evil sister and almost extinct race against Bane and his cause, and watches humanity fall, or she puts faith in an enemy who has already betrayed her. Her people over the totality of humanity―let’s hope Bane can sway her favor.

Review:

Sigh. Do you know what one of my biggest book pet peeves is? It’s when Sequels and spin-offs aren’t well labeled. What’s more, I honestly believe that authors and publishers do this purposefully so that readers who might not pick up a books 5 or 15 or 25 in a series will be tricked into picking up a book one in a poorly labeled spinoff that is actually book 5 or 15 or 25 in a previous series.

That’s how I feel about Deadmen Walking. I’ve long wanted to try a Sherrilyn Kenyon book. But Haven’t really known where to start, since there are so many of them. But when I saw book one of a what I thought was a new series, I gave it a go. Big mistake.

Deadmen Walking has no world building, a confusing muddle of mythologies and several characters (of which there are far too many) were barely introduced. It felt enough unlike a standalone book that I finally did some investigation to discover that it’s a spinoff of the Dark Hunter series.

Outside of the spinoff series issue, I also just didn’t think it was very good. It wasn’t complete shite, but it felt VERY formulaic and shallow. I saw no reason why characters who’d lived together for centuries suddenly saw each other in a different light and finally accepted love. There was no development in the romance, (again, they’d lived together for centuries). There were too many characters to keep straight and several were basically pointless. A second romance was tacked on at the end that hadn’t been developed at all. (And it felt like the female character was originally meant to be the primary love interest until Kenyon changed her mind, so she had to be matched up somewhere.) I didn’t understand the villains motivation or how she got so powerful. Bane seemed to develop abilities randomly and the pacing is inconsistent and the pacing seemed super inconsistent.

I no longer fear I might be missing out having never read a Kenyon novel.