I grabbed Rebekah Turner‘s Chaos Born from the Amazon free list, since I loved it I bought the sequel, Chaos Bound.

Description from Goodreads:
Lora Blackgoat — mercenary and smuggler — has only just recovered from the last threat on her life and hasn’t even begun to sort out the mess of having both a nephilim warrior and a reborn hellspawn as potential lovers. Work should be a refuge, but a job finding missing persons puts her in the crosshairs of a violent gang and a merchant with a taste for blood sport.

Reluctantly, Lora turns to the two men in her life for help. Roman — the nephilim — professes to be her soul mate and turns to her when he feels the darkness of nephilim madness descending. But though Lora is drawn to Roman, it is Seth, ex-lover and reborn hellspawn, who Lora must ultimately ask to protect those she loves. Can she trust Seth to save Roman and her adoptive family, or will this be a fatal mistake?

Review:
I really love Rebekah Turner’s sense of humour, which in turn means I enjoy Lora’s quips and comebacks. I simply enjoyed the experience of reading about Lora and her friends. I also liked that, while there is a little romance, it takes a major backseat, letting the adventure and Lora’s frustrations take the spotlight.

I’ll admit that I didn’t love Chaos Bound quite as much as Chaos Born, but that’s often the case with sequels. Lora just seemed to have more irons in the fire here and it left me feeling a little distracted, because nothing got much attention before skipping off to something else. This makes for a fast-paced novel, but little in-depth exploration of any single theme. However, it did all tie together in the end.

I also thought that we weren’t given enough interaction with Roman, considering how important his character was to Lora. I suppose I could say the same for Seth. This is, of course, just personal opinion though. As I said, I generally really enjoyed the book.

The writing and editing was good. Like book one, there were a number of missing words. Part of me wonders if some of this is because the author is Australian. I have a friend, for example, who always says I “I went to hospital” instead of “I went to the hospital.” This is a linguistic difference between where she grew up and were I grew up. Neither is necessarily long. So, hard to be certain, but I felt like there were the occasional missing words.

Also like book one, the world-building is still a little weak. It’s an interesting world, for sure, but it’s unclear how it relates to the real-world and I would really like to know more about this.

While the book isn’t a precipitous cliffhanger, as is so common these days, it isn’t a stand alone book either. Lora faces a couple challenges in this book and she deals with them. But there are a number of open threads left, so the reader is still left wanting at the end. I suppose what I’m saying is that the books in this series are each an episodes in a larger story, as opposed to their own, individual, self-contained stories. Don’t go in expecting to finish with all the answers. This isn’t a criticism, just a comment on the type of series it is.

All in all, I will definitely be looking for the next book in the series and any new works by Ms. Turner.