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Wild Blood

Book Review of Wild Blood (Cyborg Shifters #1), by Naomi Lucas

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I borrowed an audio copy of Naomi Lucus‘ Wild Blood through Hoopla.

Description from Goodreads:

Dommik was a monster, a Monster Hunter, and an alpha. Part of an elite group that dealt with the horrors of the universe. At least that was what everyone at the spaceport was whispering as he walked by. A Cyborg, a hunter, a beast with eyes as dark as the pits of Hell and the stride of a predator. 

Katalina was a nobody who was intimate with death. It clung to her like a shroud, It followed her like the plague, and infected her like a parasite. When she overheard that the Monster Hunter needed an assistant, she took the job. And when the Cyborg’s eyes caught hers, she knew getting closer to death might just bring her back to life. 

The Cyborg didn’t scare her. 
So she followed him and left fate up to chance. 

Review:

This was……

This was interesting, as people in my family would politely say to avoid saying anything bad. I listened to the audio version, so I can’t say with certainly that the editing was clean. But I didn’t notice any errors in the mechanical writing, as it was read. But the story was…not for me. 

I appreciated that the cyborg was less human-like than a lot of sci-fi romance cyborgs. He was truly a melding of machine, altered DNA and man (even during sex). And I appreciated that Kat wasn’t a pushover and went after what she wanted. 

But there was very little smooth progression in the romance (there was none). Dommik did some things I would find unforgivable. Most of the sex was subtly written using the language of abuse. The closest thing to an antagonist in the book is the only other significant female in the story (and she’s the sexy femme fatale archetype too, super cliched). And there’s no real plot or world-building beyond giving the characters somewhere to boink, but not so little as to mark this as straight erotica. All in all, I just kind of found this a weak showing in general. Plus, I thought the narration really flat. And sex scenes read with little inflection are awkward beyond belief.

the strip

Book Review of The Strip, by Heather Killough-Walden

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I’ve been doing a lot of diamond paintings lately. (Repetitive, slightly obsessive hobbies are dangerous things for me.) As a result, I’m flying through the audiobooks lately. The Strip, by Heather Killough-Walden is the most recent.

Description from Goodreads:

Green-eyed Malcolm Cole is a cursed werewolf, an alpha in the most powerful sense who has given up hope for any kind of happiness or peace in his life.

Until he catches wind of Claire.

Claire St. James, Charlie among friends, is an amazing young woman with an incredibly special gift. Cole recognizes this at once and swears on the spot to claim Charlie as his mate.

Of course, he isn’t the only one with such plans. Charlie is too precious to let go without a fight, and one of the most powerful alphas in the world has already staked a claim, whether Charlie—or Cole—like it or not.

Review:

There is a little bit of a story to why I read (or listened to) this book. I recently borrowed The Wolf at the Door (Big Bad Wolf #1) through Hoopla. When you get to the end of a book, Hoopla often gives you a pop-up asking if you want the next book in the series. I really like The Wolf at the Door, so I said yes. However, when I started the book, it was an entirely different series altogether, just one with the same name. 

I decided to give it a try though. I like to give pure chance a chance on occasion. Very early on I could tell this wasn’t going to be a winner to me. And I wasn’t all that surprised. I’m often wary of older PNR. I find A LOT of the content problematic. (The industry is getting better, but anything more than 10 years old is chancy for me. And this one is from 2011, so borderline.) But I stuck with it, determined to finish it so that I could write a full review. 

I’d planned to talk about how angry it makes me when what is important about the fated female mate is WHAT she is not WHO she is. How this was strongly highlighted in this particular book by the fact that Charlie probably doesn’t have 3 dozen lines of dialogue in the whole thing. What she has to say or think isn’t important, only what she is to be possessed. I’d intended to discuss how she and he literally don’t know one another, spend no time together and he used magic as mystical rohypnol to remove all agency from her. Thus, making women out to be mindless, malleable objects, rather than people with their own power and desires. I was going to put strong words on paper about how this IS NOT ROMANCE, not matter what the author says. 

But the honest to god truth is that after clawing my way through the book and gritting my teeth through sex and sexual scenes that read more as abuse than anything else, I just can’t be bothered. It’s exhausting and demoralizing to find romance framed in such a way that (if you removed the names) I literally (LITERALLY!) would not be able to tell which scenes involved the sexual sadist who tortured Charlie and which was the ‘sexy dominant’ mate who was some how supposed to love and cherish the woman he’d never had so much as a conversation with. Both were ‘rough.’ Both were described using words like “cruel.” Both emphasized being unconcerned with hurting her. With the exception of the first scene in the book, with the best friend with benefits, in which it was made explicit that he checked in with her and made sure she was ok during rough sex (involving strangulation), every other scene was rage-inducingly abusive. And I read plenty of S&M, kink-laced, BDSM books. I’m not kink shaming. But that’s not what it book contains. 

By the time I got to the end, my desire to write an intellectual review of it had withered to despondency. So, I’ll just call this tuture/rape porn and be shut of it. 

Gildart Jackson did a fine technical job with the narration, minus a tendency to swallow a lot. However, I found that having a man read a book that involved quite so much pseudo-rape and torture of a woman made it feel extra pervy and skin-crawlingly dirty.

Book Review of The Wolf at the Door (Big Bad Wolf #1), by Charlie Adhara

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Cover of The Wolf at the Door

I borrowed an audio copy of Charlie Adhara‘s The Wolf at the Door from Hoopla.

Description from Goodreads:

Hunting for big bad wolves was never part of Agent Cooper Dayton’s plan, but a werewolf attack lands him in the carefully guarded Bureau of Special Investigations. A new case comes with a new partner: ruggedly sexy werewolf Oliver Park. 

Park is an agent of The Trust, a werewolf oversight organization working to ease escalating tensions with the BSI. But as far as Cooper’s concerned, it’s failing. As they investigate a series of mysterious deaths unlike anything they’ve seen, every bone in Cooper’s body is suspicious of his new partner – even when Park proves himself as competent as he is utterly captivating. 

When more people vanish, pressure to solve the case skyrockets. And though he’d resolved to keep things professional, Cooper’s friction with Park soon erupts…into a physical need that can’t be contained or controlled. But with a body count that’s rising by the day, werewolves and humans are in equal danger. If Cooper and Park don’t catch the killer soon, one – or both – of them could be the next to go.

Review:

I generally really enjoyed this. I liked that it was mystery first, romance second. Honestly the romance barely develops. There is plenty of lust, but love….maybe not yet. But it’s coming and this book set the stage. I liked the characters and the theme of a guy trying to do the right thing and floundering a bit. I thought Dayton’s experience in the BSI could easily be read as an analogy for the way good people can enter a racist environment and slowly become so inoculated by the hate that he doesn’t even notice when he’s drowning in it. Here it’s human/werewolf, but it could easily be read more realistically. 

I had a few small niggles. I disliked that the first time they had sex it was while one was drunk. Consent was plainly and purposefully established (which I liked). But I dislike the get drunk, lose inhibitions to move plot along trope. The mystery also wasn’t hard to figure out. Lastly, I listened to the audio version. I thought it was a little too fast and flat. I wouldn’t say it’s bad by any stretch of the imagination. But I don’t have a lot of praise for it either. The story however is a winner for me. I’ll be looking for the rest of the series.

Note: Though I didn’t write individual reviews for them, I read and enjoyed The Wolf at Bay and Thrown to the Wolves too. I just haven’t been sitting down at the computer to review things for the last couple weeks. And if I don’t write a review shortly after finishing the book, I forget what I might say, especially with sequels.