Tag Archives: PNR

Review of Covet, by J.R. Ward

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Covet

I picked up J.R. Ward‘s Covet (Fallen Angels, #1) from my local library. If I’m honest I more than picked it up, I was on a waiting list for it. Needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to this one. 

Description from Goodreads:

Seven deadly sins. Seven souls to save. This is the first battle between a savior who doesn’t believe and a demon with nothing to lose!

Redemption isn’t a word Jim Heron knows much about-his specialty is revenge, and to him, sin is all relative. But everything changes when he becomes a fallen angel and is charged with saving the souls of seven people from the seven deadly sins. And failure is not an option. 

Vin DiPietro long ago sold his soul to his business, and he’s good with that-until fate intervenes in the form of a tough-talking, Harley-riding, self-professed savior. And then he meets a woman who will make him question his destiny, his sanity, and his heart-and he has to work with a fallen angel to win her over and redeem his own soul.

Review:

Oh, I just can’t tell you how disappointed I am right now. I was so very, very excited about reading this. I adore the Black Dagger Brotherhood books (most of them anyway), and Lassiter really piqued my interest, so a whole series based on the Fallen Angels…how could it go wrong? Well, I found out, didn’t I? It could go wrong in any number of ways, and Mrs. Ward seems to have found most of them. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still love her rather unique writing style–all full of la-di-das and unique grammar structures that sound so very right for the characters. But the story…the story was a serious letdown. Let’s start with the fact that Lassiter, the fallen angel who shows up in the latter BDB books to introduce this spin-off series, isn’t even in the book. That’s right, the very character who introduced readers to fallen angels was left out completely. How is that possible?

Next, the use of the noble whore falling in love with the flawed but redeemable billionaire businessman (and visa-versa) is about as cliché and trite as they come. Overused doesn’t even begin to cover it. Plus, I got really tired of all of the prostitute bashing disguised as Marie-Terese’s pangs of conscious. Yes, I concede that it is generally a mirror of society’s unfortunate opinion on the matter, but it was harangued on endlessly. 

Then there is the insta-love. Now, Ward is known for insta-love scenarios, so this isn’t really all that surprising. But here, it felt more extreme than normal since both characters had to break character to actually fall instantly in love. Marie-Terese had to abandon years of careful caution and Vin had to develop a heart he previously lacked suddenly. Even if I was willing to accept this cosmic shift in both of their mentalities I then had also to accept their sudden effusive natures. The ‘I love you,’ ‘I trust you,’ and ‘thank you for believing in me’ were flying off the shelf left and right, despite the fact that these people had known each other for collective hours. I couldn’t see for all the sappy hearts and flowers they were giving off. Gag.

I was also left wondering if Vin and Marie-Terese’s drama or Jim’s situation was the primary plot of the book. I honestly couldn’t tell. There is a serious problem when I finish a book and can’t tell who the main character was. Now, I liked Jim a lot. I liked his anti-hero personality and rather grey goodness. I liked his wingmen, Eddie and Adrian. I liked their mission, etc. But they felt incidental to Vin and Marie-Terese falling instantly in love, and I don’t think that was supposed to be the case. 

Lastly, I’m totally lost on the pantheon of these books. Since Black Dagger Brothers showed up in the background on occasion (Butch’s Red Sox hat in the last pew of the church service, running into Phury outside his NA meeting, her working for Trez, etc) I’m assuming this is the same general universe. So, how exactly do the BDB’s goddess and the Angel’s God fit together? I’m stumped. 

Since I generally love Mrs. Ward’s actual writing, I’d be willing to give the second book in this series a try to see if, given a different plot, I might like it better. But this particular book left me cold. Left me less than cold, it left me feeling like I had wasted time on. And all of it was only exacerbated by the fact that I had such high hopes going in. I really expected to love it. Such a letdown.

Book Review: Moonlight, by Tim O’Rourke

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I picked up a copy of Tim O’Rourke’s Moonlight as an Amazon freebie.
moonlight cover

When eighteen-year-old Winter McCall is offered a chance to leave her life of poverty behind on the streets of London, she moves to a remote part of the South West of England. Here she takes up the job as housekeeper to the young and handsome, yet mysterious, Thaddeus Blake.

Warned that he has some curious habits, Winter soon realises that not all is as it firsts appears at the remote mansion where she now lives and works.

Blind to the real danger that she is in, Winter finds herself becoming attracted to Thaddeus, and with nowhere and no one to run to, she slowly succumbs to his strange requests. But none of them are as strange as asking Winter to stand each night in the moonlight.

My Review:

I passed a pleasant evening with Moonlight, but anyone who has ever read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure Of The Copper Beeches will find this plot immanently familiar and predictable (just with a paranormal twist). As I have read Doyle’s works it took a little of the fun out of it for me. I pretty much knew where the book was going from very early on. Despite that, I enjoyed O’Rourke’s writing style and Thaddeus’ personality (even if Winter didn’t do too much for me) and Michelle, Claude, and Nate are fearsome foes. For a quick read, Moonlight is well worth picking up.

Shadow Love Stalkers

Book Review of Claudy Conn’s Shadow Love: Stalkers (Shadow Vampires, #1)

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Shadow LoveQuite some time ago, I grabbed a copy of Claudy Conn‘s Shadow Love: Stalkers (Shadow Vampires, #1) from the KDP free list.

Description from Goodreads:
What do you do when your father wants to turn you into a vampire and the man who offers you protection has his own, dark agenda?

Shawna Rawley has no choice but to run. Pentim Rawley, one of the most evil vampires who has ever lived, has just discovered that she is his daughter. Now he’s obsessed with finding and turning her. She doesn’t want Pentim to find the people she loves and use them to get to her. She doesn’t want him to find and turn her. She has only one ace up her sleeve. The human in her may be at risk, but in addition to being half vamp, Shawna is also a white witch!

Chad MacFare has an offer for Shawna he thinks she can’t afford to refuse: he’ll protect her from Pentim and his minions. But Shawna doesn’t trust the sexy immortal. She knows he has his own agenda-he wants to kill her father, and he wants to set her up as bait…

Review:
This book was OK. I thought it started off quite rough, but did eventually smooth itself out. I enjoyed the H & h (though I did want to slap Shawna on more than one occasion). Oddly, my favourite character was Dammon. He was just a side character (and apparently the H of the next book in the series), but I quite enjoyed his calm demeanour.

Though I generally enjoyed the book, I am not without complaints. I hate making this criticism, because I think it is horribly over used, but a lot of the book is told instead of shown. I think a full 10% goes by in the beginning before the reader gets a single sentence of dialogue that isn’t in someone’s memory. The reader is also told repeatedly how skilled Shawna is, but we don’t really see her fight or defend herself at all. We’re also treated to quite a lot of internal dialogue as both Shawna and Chad tell themselves how sexy the other is.

Though I imagine it comes into play in future books I also didn’t see the importance of the Dracula connection. It is set up in the prologue and he shows up once in the book, but doesn’t seem to have an active role in the plot. I was left wondering, ‘what’s that all about?’

I also felt that the two dangers to Shawna didn’t seem to line up. She’s supposed to be running for her father and that’s the basic framework of the story, but a good 75% of the book goes by before there is any real threat present to her by him. Most of the action centres around a demon she randomly encounters when she moves to Scotland (and amazingly and coincidentally moves in next door to Chad). This demon has nothing to do with the whole father situation and really felt very out of left field to me.

I also never understood Chad’s attitude toward Shawna. If you were meeting a woman for the first time (and all subsequent encounters with her) and needed to convince her to trust you to protect her while she endangered herself for the greater good, would you’re chosen method be antagonism and smug arrogance? He keeps trying to get her agree to his dangerous plan, but never gives her a straight answer to anything and purposefully goads her at every turn. Yes, it made for some amusing verbal sparing, but compromised his own goal repeatedly.

I will happily say this isn’t a case of insta-love. At least not on Shawna’s part. It is however a stunning example of sex = love. Shawna doesn’t trust Chad and he only admits to lusting after her. Then they have sex and voila, sudden boundless, eternal love exists. I got a little whiplash I think.

Then, after 250+ pages of supposedly running from her sociopath father (that we almost never see) the whole book wraps up in about a page and a half. The climax was a little underwhelming I have to admit. Despite all of the above, I did enjoy most of the book. It took a little while for me to settle into the story. But once I did it rolled along well enough and it presented an interesting new birth of vampires myth.