Book Review: Assistant to the Villain, by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

I borrowed an audio copy of Hannah Nicole Maehrer‘s Assistant to the Villain through Hoopla.

ASSISTANT WANTED: Notorious, high-ranking villain seeks loyal, levelheaded assistant for unspecified office duties, supporting staff for random mayhem, terror, and other Dark Things In General. Discretion a must. Excellent benefits.

With ailing family to support, Evie Sage’s employment status isn’t just important, it’s vital. So when a mishap with Rennedawn’s most infamous Villain results in a job offer—naturally, she says yes. No job is perfect, of course, but even less so when you develop a teeny crush on your terrifying, temperamental, and undeniably hot boss. Don’t find evil so attractive, Evie.

But just when she’s getting used to severed heads suspended from the ceiling and the odd squish of an errant eyeball beneath her heel, Evie suspects this dungeon has a huge rat…and not just the literal kind. Because something rotten is growing in the kingdom of Rennedawn, and someone wants to take the Villain—and his entire nefarious empire—out.

Now Evie must not only resist drooling over her boss but also figure out exactly who is sabotaging his work…and ensure he makes them pay.

After all, a good job is hard to find.

I have got to stop letting TikTok convince me to read books. I’m having difficulty remembering a book that left me feeling as let down as this one did. First off, how did I miss that this is set in a fairytale setting? I’ll accept that the fact that I missed this is probably on me. But I was 100% put off when I finally realized what I had really signed on for in choosing to read this book. Just go ahead and preemptively roll your eyes. You’ll want to before you get very far into this story.

I could nitpick a million reasons this book didn’t work for me. But there are a few main ones I will concentrate on. First, I was bored silly. The book is working hard to be quirky and, yes, silly.But I’m fairly sure being bored silly was not the aim. There is far too little plot to keep a reader engaged. Second, the author tries far, far too hard to be funny, and most of the jokes don’t land. Third, how exactly are you going to title a book, Assistant to the Villian, and then write a villain that isn’t really a villain? I was incredibly disappointed and somehow also not at all surprised by this fact. Fourth, while the villain may not be villainous, he also isn’t particularly charismatic, and the heroine is a bland Mary Jane. Fifth, it ends on a cliffhanger…because, of course, it does. Sixth, the narrator (Em Eldridge) was wrong for the book. She did a fine technical job but didn’t carry it off in a tone that worked for the story.

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Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

Book Review – Infala: The Alien’s Bond, by Kira Quinn

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I won a giveaway for signed copies of the first three books in Kira Quinn’s Mark of the Infala series. This week, I read the first one, Infala: The Alien’s Bond, and can happily mark Q off my yearly author alphabet challenge. Q is usually one of the last ones I manage, and every year, I say it won’t be. Well, it wasn’t a lie this year.

As if alien abduction wasn’t bad enough, it seemed Darla’s captors didn’t want her for something as simple as breeding or even experimentation. The Raxxians were nasty pieces of work, and they had other plans in mind. Namely, they wanted to eat her, and not in the fun way. But the universe, it seemed, had other plans.

Spared a gruesome fate when the Raxxian ship crashed on a distant world, Darla found herself suddenly free. Free but on an alien planet with only the company of another former prisoner.
An alien.
A tall, muscular, impossibly alluring alien.
One who didn’t seem thrilled about taking the little human woman under his protection, at least not at first. Little did either of them know just how hot their time together on this new world would become, and in a way that had nothing to do with the planet’s blazing sun.

I simply didn’t enjoy this. I disliked the heroine. She was bossy and selfish, without any personal or character growth to give it purpose. The hero was likable but about as charismatic and interesting as bologna on white bread. There really isn’t a plot beyond trekking through the woods and reacting to whatever random thing pops up. The villains are cliched rapists, though the author neither makes this relevant enough to avoid it being nothing more than low-hanging, lazy plotting nor commits to it enough to make it feel real. And the whole thing is very predictable.

I did appreciate that the bossy heroine was almost a little fem-domme-like, but I suspect that this was accidental on the author’s part. I also liked that the hero showed emotion, even crying at points. All in all, however, while I’m sure this will no doubt float some people’s boats, it didn’t mine.

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Book Review: Storm of Sin, by Patricia D. Eddy

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I received a signed copy of Patricia D. Eddy‘s Storm of Sin in a monthly Romance Reveal Book Box.

My crimes are legion. My sentence eternal.
Hell fractured my soul into dust and left me broken, yet I deserved so much worse.
Finally free from Lucifer’s torment, I must atone.
But the lives I took and the pain I caused haunt me every day.
Half angel, half demon, but nowhere near whole.
Until I meet her.

I should not want Zoe Dawes, but she whispers her desires in my dreams and chases away my nightmares.
When an ancient evil returns, only I can stop him. But if I do, I risk losing everything—including the woman who reminds me what it is to feel. To live.
Zoe is mine. And nothing will keep us apart.
I work for the Bureau of the Occult and the Other. Zoe is my partner.

My name is Sinclair.
But you can call me Sin.

I enjoyed this well enough. The writing is readable, the editing pretty clean, and I liked the characters. There was just something missing, though. Nothing in it lit me on fire, and it is very clearly part of a series (though not labeled as such) or, at the least, a spin-off of a series. I suspect it’s a spinoff or part of the Cursed Coven series, as Maddox and Killian from Wicked Omens make an appearance. (I’ve not read it, but I was so certain Storm of Sin must be a spin-off of something that I took a dive into other Eddy books to find any obvious overlap.) While this is still followable, I felt the lack of other books.

But more than that, the plot is fairly unsubstantial. I liked the romantic aspect, but there wasn’t enough of the rest of the plot to truly suck me in. More importantly, I felt the villain and his motives were cliched. While I appreciate that the hero in this book had been traumatized in the past and was still affected by it. He was traumatized by what he was made to do, while women are consistently traumatized by what is done to them. This is an important distinction.

I often complain when reading books in this and similar genres that women are always and exclusively victims and men are perpetrators, even when the distinction doesn’t really make any sense. As in this book, if demons are bidding on the chance to abuse someone for a night (this includes rape, but isn’t limited to or even necessarily predominantly rape), why would women be the only ones? Since this perpetrator/victim dichotomy is part of our unspoken cultural narrative, it isn’t unusual to encounter it. (I call it the low-hanging fruit of plotting for a reason.) But I find that sometimes you feel it more in a book than others. Eddy, here, leans pretty hard into it, and, as always, I’m generally bored with the lack of imagination it takes to write such a plotline.