The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey

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Mercedes Lackey seems to be one of those authors who have a few gems in her vast number of published books, but it’s a case of unearthing which ones work for you as a reader. Considering how much she churns out, this comes as no real surprise. I’ve only read one of her books before, Gwenhwyfar, which I didn’t really like. If I’m honest, the only reason I picked up this book is because it’s a Beauty and the Beast retelling and I can’t resist such a book.

Information:

Title: The Fire Rose

Author: Mercedes Lackey

Series: Elemental Masters #1

Publisher: Baen

Target Audience: Adult

Genre: Fantasy

Length: 433 pages

Story: In 1905, Medieval scholar Rosalind Hawkins is left destitute when her father dies, forcing her to accept the offer that has mysteriously come her way of becoming a governess in San Francisco. But she arrives to find a house without children, a wife, or even an employer--only a terrible secret.

Thoughts and impressions: Unfortunately, I soon found myself frustrated and uninspired by the characters in this book. Paul du Mond (Beast’s right-hand man) in particular was just too much! He’s one of those seedy guys who feed off the work of others rather than doing any work himself; he likes to “break in” the new prostitutes – quelling their spirits so they’ll be pliable for other clients – and even learnt Spanish so he could give the Mexican girls a verbal thrashing as well as a physical one. I think that the author was just trying to use this as a means of introducing the world of San Francisco’s world of prostitution at the turn of the 20^th century. I certainly picked up a lot of information that I’d been unaware / half aware of, but I didn’t feel that du Mond’s character was balanced enough for this to go down well. He had no positive attributes whatsoever and that made him very unbelievable for me.

In fact, none of the characters were particularly balanced. The good were sugary good and the bad had no redeeming qualities. Moreover, the Beast doesn’t even grow as a person. The whole idea behind Beauty and the Beast is that Beauty’s love allows Beast to grow and improve as a person. It doesn’t matter whether or not he transforms into the perfect, able-bodied man, there still has to be that character growth!  This particular Beast ends up as the exact same person that he was at the start of the novel.  Don’t even get me started on Rose. She was just so… I don’t even know but I could not like her at all. On top of that she’s too much on the side of perfection for my tastes.

If you know me, you’ll know that I adore Beauty and the Beast and that I’ll eat up anything with a passing resemblance to that fairy tale. I’m very sad to say that this is the first time ever that I’ve not liked a Beauty and the Beast retelling. I was bored, put off and uninspired by the characters and on top of this Beast is called Jason Cameron. It’s often written out in full like that and I’d find myself reading it as James Cameron all the time. I had to keep stopping and rereading the name!

The book’s redeeming feature is its magic system. I rather liked the mastery of the elements and how familiars would work for their master, helping them in their spell casting. I quite liked the ritual system as well and how Magick was not just at the practitioner’s fingertips. I even liked how the Eastern magical ways differ from those practised in the West, but how they could both learn from each other.

Now, if only the rest of the book had been as good as the magic system. This is the second time that I’ve been stung by a Mercedes Lackey book. I’ll think long and hard before picking up another.

Style: I can’t put my finger on what exactly it was about the style that didn’t appeal to me but I found it pretty tough going. I even put the book down at one point for a week or so while I read some other books instead.

Final verdict: Really just not my cup of tea I’m afraid. 2 stars

Extra notes: I don't think there was any bad language. No explicit sex though prostitution and what is essentially the rape of kidnapped girls are mentioned in passing.

Motor City Mage by Cindy Spencer Pape

I received this book courtesy of the publisher from NetGalley.

Information:

Title: Motor City Mage

Series: Urban Arcana #4

Author: Cindy Spencer Pape

Publisher: Carina Press

Target Audience: Adult

Pages: 191

Chapters: 13 + epilogue

PoV: 3^rd person

Tense: Past tense

Story: As a cop who keeps paranormals in line, Des has a hard time trusting them. So why does he want the beautiful werewolf Lana more than his next breath? She's mouthy, flamboyant and distractingly sexy—not the type of woman for a reserved mage like him. Lana admires Des, but she can't be with someone who won't take her seriously, no matter how much she'd love to rip off his dress shirt. 

When a dangerous new drug shows up in Detroit, Des must locate the source, and Lana is determined to help. But their plan goes awry, trapping them in a demon dimension. To return home, Lana and Des must flee through a series of unpredictable alternate realities, fighting enemies while trying to shut down the drug trade. But if they're going to survive, they'll have to rely on each other, even though getting closer will add fuel to a fire that's already burning out of control...

Thoughts and impressions: First of all, let me point out that I went into this novel, the fourth in a series, without having read the first three books. While it is possible to read this book as a standalone, there are a lot of allusions of events in the previous books in the first few chapters that did leave me feeling a bit left out.

At first glance, this book seems to have all the right ingredients to be one that really tickles my fancy: various flavours of mythical beings all living among us humans and protecting us from various other flavours of mythical beings, magic and mayhem, and romance to boot. So it sounds like it’d by just my thing… but unfortunately it wasn’t.

For starters, Des and Lana both secretly desire each other as soon as the book opens. While I can accept that there will have been things passing between them in previous books, I would have liked at least some work up to their relationship, alas this was not to be. They soon (and we’re talking before the 10% mark here) get physical, which is much too early in a book for my tastes. For me, it’s the lead up to the sex that’s interesting and the sex itself is just the icing on the cake. Here I only got the icing and, as anyone who eats only the icing will know, it’s not as nice without the cake (and is, in fact, liable to make you feel ill).

By the time chapter two is over and done with, they’ve just slid right into this sexual relationship, no fretting, no awkwardness, no questions asked. I felt like I’d missed out on the whole of their courtship, and if I’m honest with myself, the courtship is the whole reason why I read romance novels in the first place.

What’s more, I’m not particularly fond of romances where events are just there to string together the sex scenes. I did occasionally feel that this was the case in this novel. Indeed, there are what I consider to be a large number of sex scenes present for a novel of this length and some – not all, but some – just really didn’t work for me. The language use in these “some” felt clunky with expressions like “she milked his cock”. Sometimes it felt like the author herself wasn’t quite at ease with what she was describing and as such these scenes came across as awkward.

Basically, the sex started too soon, happened too often and felt too central to the plot for my particular tastes.

Beyond this, in certain scenes there were just far too many characters present, all doing different things but without sufficiently distinct voices for me to be able to differentiate between them. This led to moments of frustration for me as I couldn’t remember who exactly X was, where Y came into it all, or what the relationship with Z happened to be.

In contrast, the scenes where only two to four characters were present worked well and I especially liked the scenes where Des and Lana were being held captive in a prison cell. Another was when they were travelling across a very cold planet and they come across an alien who offers them a ride in his cart. Scenes like these really shone.

As for the plot itself, certain things just felt like they were handed to the characters far too easily, such as Vin’s involvement with him immediately reaching out to them, or Des’s boss’s downfall at the end of the novel. Vin taking Des and Lana into the demons’ drug operation led to one particularly clunky fight scene too, which leads me to think that those sorts of scenes are not this author’s forte. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as every author has something they find harder to describe in a way that transports the reader. That was the only fight scene that left me cringing, though.

Another thing that I really enjoyed was Des and Lana’s trek through the other dimensions that they have to travel through in their attempt to return home to Earth. The author’s vivid imagination really brought these places to life for me. Now I want an ele-cow too! They sound so adorable.

Had the book been focused on these travels more than the sex, then I can quite see that I would have found this a very entertaining story. As it is, this just wasn’t the book for me. I think that it would appeal to other readers who do prefer more sex in their stories.

Style: Occasionally things were mentioned twice a few paragraphs apart and some scenes were particularly clunky. It was a very colloquial style with extra words where they’re not needed in places and words completely left out in others.

Final verdict: At the end of the day, this book just wasn’t my cup of tea. It had its redeeming qualities but unfortunately the things that didn’t work for me outweighed them. 2 stars

Extra notes: Bad language is present. Obviously sex is too.

The Witches by Peter Curtis

Arie and I went to Amsterdam a couple of months ago to get some clothes for a big night out with his colleagues. As the English-language bookstores are in Amsterdam, he very kindly offered to buy me two books while we were there! Woo! So while I was browsing, this title The Witches caught my eye. Coincidentally enough, I’d read the book’s synopsis only a day or two before and it had struck me as interesting and the cover was really very pretty (in a slightly creepy sort of way). With this in mind, I decided to take the book.

Presentation: A large paperback. There are 346 pages broken down into 25 chapters of roughly the same length.

Story: Canon Thorby is looking for someone to replace the current headmistress, who is retiring, of his small private school in Walwyk. Miss Mayfield appears to be the perfect choice: she spent a good length of time abroad in Entuba, Africa, trying to improve the lives of the natives; she appears to be docile and keeps to herself - just the woman for the job.

But when Miss Mayfield arrives in Walwyk, she soon discovers that one of her pupils is being abused by her grandmother and for some unknown reason, this girl will not speak out against her abuser. Miss Mayfield realises that not all is quite right in this seemingly quaint village and anyone who gets too close to the truth ends up having an accident. Despite the dangers, Miss Mayfield is determined to get to the bottom of everything.

Thoughts and impressions: The first thing I have to say is that at no point did I really feel any tension. Even at the end of the book when the climax was in full swing it was never particularly suspenseful.  A lot of the time the narrative was just meandering about, hinting at various things but never getting to the point where I really wanted to know more about them. Indeed, after Miss Mayfield’s inevitable ‘accident’, I was ready to tear my hair out as it just completely stopped the story when it had only just got to the point where it was verging on getting interesting.

What’s more, there were a number of threads of the plot that were just left hanging. Miss Mayfield sets up a date with a man but the book finishes before it gets to that point. She pawns a ring as she desperately needs the cash, repeating multiple times that she wants it back but she never goes to pick it up. We never find out what happened to Rose’s letters (though I suppose we can guess).

I never really felt a connection to most of the characters and I think at times I was supposed to. Isabel Thorby is one where I don’t know how exactly I was supposed to deduce her role from the one short scene she gets towards the start of the story.

Really, I suppose that the story is perfectly fine, just somewhat dated. For all I know, this might have been typical of a horror story in the 1960s when it was written. Now, it never got my heart beating a little faster or had me hooked on every word on the page. I did, however, stop and blink a few times when I managed to forget that there have been significant advances in technology and then something is referred to in the story that was cutting-edge at that time but standard now (such as a torch with two buttons: one so the light flashes on only while the button is pressed and one that can be left down so that the light stays on.)

It’s funny that this would happen as I was almost always aware of the difference in other areas of society, such as religion. Though her religion doesn’t play a major role, Miss Mayfield does occasionally refer to God and the divine hand guiding her as well as a number of other things that were a common way of thinking in that day and age but have become less wide-spread in an increasingly atheist society.

While I’m sure that the author did her research on ‘witches’, a lot of the rites described in the book just seemed to be along the ‘we-reject-Christianity!’ lines and were designed to shock a Christian reader rather than actually being anything like the rituals I know of. As such this didn't ring true for me and just felt like anti-witchcraft propaganda.

And lastly, the ending was not very satisfactory. It felt to me as though the ending came before the story had really ended.

Style: Though the author's name on the book is masculine, this is actually a pseudonym and the author was a woman. I was fairly aware of this from the style of the narrative. I couldn’t say what, exactly stood out to me as being a marker of a female writer, but it just didn’t feel very male as I was reading it. The style is good, though the writing is full of punctuation that shouldn’t be there. There are commas randomly placed in the middle of sentences and speech marks where there is no speech. This made things confusing at times.

Final verdict: Though the style was fine, the story failed to capture and keep my attention. 2 stars.

Extra notes: I don’t remember any bad language. Sex behind closed doors.

The Captain's Christmas Family by Deborah Hale

Earlier this year I read another of this author’s books. While Bought: The Penniless Lady failed to blow me away, it did provide me with an evening of enjoyable entertainment and it drew me in to the point where I wanted to know the outcome more than I wanted to sleep. So when I saw that the author would be releasing a seasonal story that was still on the cheap side, I decided to go for it.

Story: With the recent loss of their father, Cissy and Dolly Radcliffe find themselves orphans and with no male heir, their property passes to the next male in line. This happens to be Captain Gideon Radcliffe – a man who devoted his life to serving his country but was recently embroiled in a scandal that saw his ship taken away from him. He doesn’t know how to interact with such young children after so many years of having to keep a tight rein on his ship’s crew, but the girl’s governess, Miss Marian Murray, spies something in him.

She brokers a deal with him that the girls will get to spend one last Christmas in their family home, secretly hoping that he will grow to love them enough to want to challenge their aunt – who is in no way capable of taking care of such young children – for custody. And maybe they’ll both find love in the process.

Thoughts and impressions: Really, before I even started, I should have realised that this book would contain a significant Christian message. I didn’t expect to be whacked over the head with it quite so much, though. As someone born in the more secular Europe and raised by atheist parents, I’m sceptical of religion and religious texts. Sometimes the message bordered on insulting for me – I think at one point Marian wonders how Gideon can deal with all his problems without leaning on God’s love. Those of us who do no turn to God manage perfectly well without him thank you very much. The fact that she pities him because his faith is not strong enough really didn’t sit well with me and led to several frustration-riddled moments.

It is also implied that prayer has an effect. All tests done on prayer have shown that it doesn’t change anything, but the author uses this as prolepsis and often announces future events in the characters’ prayers.

I understand why religion plays a role in the story, but at times the whole thing seemed to revolve around religion and nothing else, which was just too much for me and started to put me off the book.

The children are pretty stereotypical, though fitting different moulds. Dolly is outgoing and boisterous while Cissy is quiet and reserved. They were cute but at times too cliché for my tastes. Occasionally they were blatantly used to further certain parts of the relationship between Gideon and Marian and once or twice their actions or speech felt particularly unnatural.

Gideon and Marian have the communication problem of the year. One of them says something and the other hears the exact opposite of what they meant. I know authors use this technique a lot to further certain situations, but rarely have I seen it used this much.

The book is classed as being a love-inspired historical but for me it’s a clean historical romance. The history doesn’t have much to do with it beyond being a period setting – well, except for the traditions (which were very well researched). The budding romance, however, is everything. Both of the characters are prone to drifting off into endless monologues questioning their feelings, the other’s supposed feelings, the other’s supposed actions, and so on. They do go on! Sometimes I felt that there could have been more of an obstacle introduced as the two “obstacles” that are presented don’t really get much attention when compared with the other.

Also, the synopsis of the book is misleading. It mentions a “battle of wills” but there’s no such thing. The story is about the captain coming to love this new and very different life away from the sea.

I’m sure that Christian fans of a holiday romance read will enjoy this book, but circumstances just weren’t right for me to enjoy this. It wasn’t my cup of tea but I wouldn’t say that it has put me off giving the author a third chance at some point in the future.

Style: I have nothing in particular to say about the style.

Final verdict: Not for me. I could see the good in it but the frustrations eclipsed it. 2 stars

Extra notes: No bad language. No sex.

Changeless by Gail Carriger

I’ve had this book sitting on my shelves for almost a year now. I came across Soulless, the first book in The Parasol Protectorate series quite by accident last September. I read and enjoyed the book and immediately ordered in the other two currently available books. Unfortunately, Blameless, the third book in the series, was delivered first and Changeless was to be delayed by up to a week. I wanted another fix and I couldn’t be bothered to wait a week, so I decided I would read books 2 and 3 in the wrong order. Even more unfortunately, I did not like Blameless at all. This put me off the mere idea of reading Changeless and consequently it has been shunned, ignored on my shelves. Until now.

The only reason I picked up this book now is because the fourth book in the series, Heartless, was recently released and for some reason I will not pretend to understand, I immediately snapped up a copy of the book. Before delving into Heartless I wanted to know the events of all the previous books so I chose to ignore my trepidation and give Changeless a whirl…

Presentation: Mass market paperback. There are 374 pages broken down into 14 chapters. The chapters tend to be touching on the long side at approx. 30 pages each.

Story: Lady Alexia Maccon, formerly Alexia Tarabotti, wakes up one evening to find a werewolf army regiment camped on her front lawn, a rude Gamma not aware of her status, and central London hit by some form of “humanisation” epidemic. The vampires and the werewolves are frantic, and Alexia, as Muhjah to the queen, has to get to the bottom of this riddle. When, the next day, she finds that her husband, the Alpha werewolf Conall Maccon, has left for Scotland and his previous, currently Alpha-less pack whom he deserted some twenty years previously, Alexia is notified that this humanisation epidemic is also heading north. Putting two and two together, she realises that whatever is causing the problem must be in the hands of the Kingair pack, the pack her husband is going to sort out.

Seeing no other option, Alexia immediately plans to fly to Scotland on the next dirigible out of London… unfortunately for her, she has quite the entourage foisted upon her before she can leave: Tunstell, her husband’s claviger (a werewolf’s ‘personal servant’) and actor; her insipid and shallow sister, Felicity; and her airhead of a best friend, Miss Ivy Hisselpenny . On top of this already impressive entourage, a new acquaintance, the daring Madame Lefoux, French inventor who dresses like a man, seems to be following them on their trip up north.

But Alexia has no time to worry about this. There is a mystery, and the soulless Alexia needs to get to the bottom of it!

Thoughts and impressions: I like the idea behind this series. Basically, Alexia is a preternatural (as opposed to a supernatural). She has no soul and her touch causes a supernatural to temporarily become human again (or in the case of a ghost, exorcises it). Only people with a natural overabundance of soul can become supernatural (werewolf, vampire or ghost). Due to her lack of soul, Alexia is very pragmatic and can only accept logical answers, being unable to take anything on faith.

The book is not meant to be taken seriously, and it is intended to be humour. I think it’s intended to be British humour, but it’s not. There are very few laugh out loud moments (I think I only laughed out loud once during the whole of Changeless) and the humour often feels forced. It’s good that it’s light, but sometimes it takes the lightness too far and in this case it meant that the story didn’t become interesting for a long time. It took me a whole week to read this book – six days to read the first 174 pages, an evening to finish off the last 200. Once it got to the point where it was interesting, the plot worked quite well, though the villain was obvious and the source of the humanisation problem evident to the reader a good while before Alexia figured it out.

There wasn’t enough Lord Akeldama in this book. He lightens things, plus, who can resist a who-knows-how-old vampire with openly ‘flowery gay’ mannerisms? Not I.

Warning: there’s a cliffhanger ending to this one so you’ll want Blameless at the ready to pick up as soon as you’re done with it.

Style: I hate all the Americanisms in the writing when there is an obvious effort to make the speech sound period British (though the author fails at this too from time to time and uses blatantly modern American language.)  As mentioned, the humour often feels forced and though I appreciate the lightness of the book I do not find it all that funny. I will expand on this point in the review of Heartless.

As a side note, I find it an insult to Jane Austen to compare this work with hers. This work is mediocre at best. Jane Austen’s is an excellent commentary on the society of her era.

Final verdict: The story took too long to get interesting; the lightness was sometimes too light, detracting from the plot; and it just didn’t appeal to me in the way the first book did. Admittedly, I may have gone into this book with some prejudices considering my dislike of Blameless (if I had to read about a British aristocrat talking about “ladybugs” one more time I was going to blow my top) but I still did not really like this one. 2 stars.

Extra notes: Occasional language, though it stays on the light side; several intimate scenes, though it fades out before sex takes place. I would recommend for older teens and up.

Last Sacrifice by Richelle Mead

This is the last book in the Vampire Academy series. As such there WILL be spoilers pertaining to events in previous books. Fair warning.

This review will contain spoilers for the ending of this book and series.

Author: Mead has known a lot of success in a relatively short period. She’s currently got three series on the go. Vampire Academy, certainly her most famous work to date, is riding the vampire wave created by Twilight. It also has to be said that her hair is an amazing shade of red, very pretty!

Presentation: Quite a large paperback. The font is a relatively large size with wide spacing. There are 594 pages broken down into 36 chapters.

Story: Rose is in prison, awaiting trial for the murder of Queen Tatiana. Having condemned herself even further at the end of book 5 by speaking before thinking, in typical Rose fashion, her friends take it into their own hands to break her out. They hope that once she is freed, without her imminent execution hanging over all their heads, they will be able to discover who really murdered the Moroi queen. But all of her friends need to look innocent in the matter, so none of them can join her in her escape. One person can though: Dimitri. Dimitri, who still considers Lissa a goddess and his personal saviour, would do anything for the Dragomir princess, including running away with Rose even though she reminds him too much of his past as one of the Strigoi. Joining them is Sydney the Alchemist, who owes Abe, Rose’s father, a favour for some unknown, but obviously big, reason. Rose doesn’t want to just lie low and hide, though. She received a message from the late Tatiana, telling her that there is another Dragomir child, an illegitimate child, whose appearance in court would give Lissa the power she needs to help sway politics (Lissa can’t take her rightful place as one of the ruling families because of a law stating that there must be at least one other family member.) So Rose manages to screw everything up for herself, Dimitri and Sydney, forcing them to flee, while Lissa runs for queen back at court and everyone tries to figure out who really killed Tatiana. On top of this, Rose and Dimitri try to figure out what they mean to each other (conveniently forgetting all about Adrian), someone seems to be trying to kill Lissa, Victor and Robert reappear to turn another Strigoi back to Moroi, and Rose is slowly losing her battle against the madness incurred by the use of spirit.

(I repeat now – this review DOES contain spoilers for the ending of this book. If you do not wish to read spoilers, do not continue reading.)

Thoughts and impressions: I’m torn about this book. It is certainly about on par with most of the other books in the series (for quality) but it has one big, big problem: it is not an ending! Sure, Rose and Dimitri have their happy ending, but they’re the only ones. Everything else, absolutely everything else!, is not rounded off. In fact, Mead spends more time introducing the premises for the spinoff series (Bloodlines) than she does wrapping up events for this series. This really, really annoys me. When you read a series, the last book should wrap up enough that you don’t need to read another series to get an actual ending. A series should be able to stand on its own two feet. This one can’t even kneel.

There are so many questions that don’t get answered.

- Who is Abe really? Why does he carry so much power? Why do the other vamps seem to revere him when he’s not a royal?

- What happened to Victor’s corpse? They just abandoned it. Did anyone find it? Does the vamp community, that considers him the biggest enemy of the state, realise that he’s even dead or are they still wasting energy looking for him?

- What happened to Robert? They just abandoned him. Did he pick himself up and go off to hide again? Wouldn’t he have come after Rose to revenge the death of his brother?

- What happened to Eddie? He played such an important role in the series, but we have no idea what’s happened to him. We get a cryptic clue that not all is well for him. Again, it should not be so at the end of a series!

- What happened to Sydney? Last we knew about her, she was being held hostage in a hotel…

- Was Sonya Karp accepted back into Moroi society with ease or did she have to undergo endless tests like Dimitri?

- Why was the Keeper community introduced? What was with Angeline begging Rose to take her away, into the real world? Why were these people introduced anyway? We spend about 100 pages with them then the characters leave and we never hear from them again! I suspect they’re for Bloodlines, but in that case they should not have been introduced in Vampire Academy.

- When Rose was last with Dimitri’s family, Viktoria accused her of betraying her. There is no resolution given to this.

- Did Dimitri even contact his family to let them know of his miraculous return to the living? We know he knows that they know he got turned into a Strigoi. He and Rose talk about it in book 4 when he’s holding her hostage. There is absolutely no mention of his family in books 5 and 6. Wouldn’t he have wanted to contact them? It would have been one of the first things I would have wanted to do!

- I really wanted to know what motives were behind Dimitri’s actions in book 4. Why did he kidnap Rose and not just kill her? Why did he torment her with the kisses? The bites? The withholding of sex? Why did he want her to turn Strigoi to be with him? Was it love that became warped into unnatural obsession? Was it just because he views her as a good soldier who would be able to help him reach the higher echelons of Strigoi society? Throughout the whole of the book I kept hoping that Mead would touch on this, would explain it a bit. But no. It was ignored, forgotten. That really annoyed me because I think it would have been fascinating to get inside Strigoi Dimitri’s mind.

-  What about Adrian? I’ve said it before, he’s a character with a lot of room for personal growth, and all this is ignored for Rose and Dimitri. He deserves better than Rose. She keeps telling herself she loves Adrian then she spends all her time thinking about Dimitri, kissing Dimitri, having sex with Dimitri… and she doesn’t have the balls to break it off with Adrian first. And he had to learn by walking in on a personal moment between the two of them. Even Dimitri is a useless lump of lard in this bit (as painful as it is for me to say so.) He’s all like “I’m not going to be the guy who steals another guy’s girl” and then about a page later he’s busy getting nakkie with Rose! Why did he even bother with the whole “I have honour” speech? Obviously he doesn’t and he’s willing to let Rose boss him around. Pussy.

I’ll stop now because I’m starting to feel annoyed. In case you can’t tell.

Style: As with every other book in this series, the style is extremely clunky. The editors needed to edit better. It’s very colloquial, and that’s fine, but the non-English syntax should not have got past them. I’ve got to the point where I ask myself whether they even edited it properly. Sigh.

Final verdict: I wanted to like this one. I really, really did. But all of the characters annoyed me. Even Dimitri, who I usually adore - even when he’s evil. On top of that, it’s the last book in the series but it offers little to no closure. I cannot, in all good conscience, give this book more than 2 stars.

Extra notes: Contains sex (not described in detail, but present), murder, and plenty of foul language.