REVIEW, the shadow Wolf

Vanak turns up the heat in this scintillating romance in which sworn enemies become lovers....

    Prod dets

The Shadow Wolf

Series: Khamsin, book 10

Pub: 2011, Mills & Boon (harlequin)

Author: Bonnie Vanak

Genre: paranormal romance

Format: paperback (sm); 229pp w/ 24 chapters

Whose: Megan & Gabriel

Age Range: adult                                             

            Synopsis

On the run from authorities, gutsy Megan Moraine knows shadow wolves like herself have no place in this world. But she’s still prepared to do anything to protect her young charges. That resolve is tested when the trio are captured by Gabriel Ronichaux.

Everyone knows Gabriel is a ruthless bounty hunter, a member of an elite group called the Enforces. Why then is Megan so attracted to her enemy—a wolf who hunts his own people? A wolf whose languid, sexy drawl makes her dream the impossible.

            Thoughts

Okay, so the first time I started writing this I focused my efforts on the fact that near the end of the story I finally realised where I had read the authors names before, and the book she’d written that I had read.

I’m sorta doing it again, but it’s like the only thing that keeps popping in my head. It’s a novella called ‘Seducing the Vampire’ and I—well, you can see, I’ll link the review with it in it here!

The rest of what I wrote was gibberish from a mind unmade and I thought I’d sleep on it and give it a try in the morning.

....tick, tock, tick, tock.....

You see the problem is I haven’t made up my mind because I don’t believe I gave my all to the story. This is mostly because my page 47 I was over it, but I pushed myself threw the rest of it so that I could get it over with, and so....

It’s not as if I thought the book was all that bad. Really, the world is insanely great, I love it. The characters are all so real and the....everything about it, individually, was great. But she’s an author—or it could just be this series?! She just, I don’t know, focus’ more on the world than on her characters and that is something in a romance I don’t particularly care for.

But that’s me. Like I said, she writes well, it wasn’t anything to do with her writing, nothing that pissed me off. Actually I found that a lot of her scenes were well thought threw and, well, real.

But I just....yeah, it just did nothing for me.

Mostly though, the story was about pain. Or I’m sure that’s what it was meant to be between them. Both dealing with long pain that came from what they are and childhood problems. But I just didn’t feel it. Honestly it took me sleeping on it to realise this was what it seemed centred on. There shared pain and powers.

It’s what I mean about the human in the romance, it just wasn’t there. That emotional depths that gets you hooked and falling in love with the characters as they fall in love with each other.

Honestly, it mostly went about the chase. Which in retrospect ended way too soon for the amount of enfaces in it.

Which annoyed me to no end. Really, why have this long fought chase with two slices of nothing and that person is dead? Why focus your entire book on him, on that point and not have it a BIG part in the story. If she’d done that, I probably would have loved it, but as it was, a small paragraph later and dead.

This happened twice, one minute you’re sorta learning about it and the next everyone’s dead and everything’s better.

Though that could be because this is the end of the series? But then, what do I know.

Anyway, if you’re a fan, and have read the series, this book could have meant more, because the characters might have been known, at least one of them, again, I don’t know and couldn’t be bothered doing the small amount of research to figure it out. But at least three brothers had wives so there was probably a book about it. There seemed a big deal about those characters, like she was just checking in on them so that you could see what’s there’ve been up to. See that there still happy.

Series

The Falcon and the Dove, the Tiger and the Tomb, the Cobra and the Concubines, the Panther and the Pyramid, the Sword and the Sheath, the Scorpion and the Seducer, The Lady and the Libertine, [tb]

☼☼☼