Sunday, January 04, 2015

Melanie's Week in Review - January 4, 2015




Happy New Year! I hope you are all having a great 2015 so far. I have high hopes for some fantastic reads for the new year, mainly as I have been selected as a beta reader for Michael J. Sullivan's new series  - First Empire. I am super excited already.

In the last week I have managed to read a few books. I wasn't certain that I would get much read as I have been on leave so no long commutes to give me ample reading time. So what did I read?

I finished reading Transmuted by Karina Cooper but I will be writing a full review so can't give too much away. I did find that the price of Night Broken the 8th in the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs had at last dropped to an acceptable, Kindle version amount. I loved this series at the start. Mercy ranked up there with Kate Daniels (Ilona Andrews) in my estimation as kick ass heroine. When Mercy married the 'too good to be true' Adam she has sorted wimped out and gets violently beaten up each book. Night Broken  has marginally improved my view of this series as Mercy has seemed to have re-grown her backbone, especially when Adam's ex-wife and manipulator supreme returns to town with a malevolent god-stalker in pursuit. It's up to Mercy to overcome her dislike of the woman who can still wrap Adam and the rest of the pack around her very human pinky to save the day.

I thought this instalment was quite different from the others. Firstly, Mercy - the coyote shapeshifter doesn't shift once. This has always been a focus of previous novels and even with her werewolf pack the shapeshifting takes a back seat. A number of characters from previous books also pop up in the story either as background, in conversation or are part of the plot. I thought it was a good 'melange' of supernatural characters including the werewolves (of course), the Coyote, fae, vampires and other gods and monsters. Overall, a good read but Mercy's boobs are WAY too big in this cover! She looks more like Lara Croft than the mechanic, coyote shifter Mercy Thompson.

I then discovered that the next book in the Seven series by Dannika Dark  - Four Days had been released. After the previous book Five Weeks I didn't think I was going to continue the series but I thought I would give it another go. This time the love story focused on Ivy and Lorenzo Church. Ivy had been basically traded off by her father and had been enjoying living with her new pack until the big baddy from her previous life shows up. A chain of ridiculous events lead Ivy to end up living with the macho Church where he violent and abusive past is discovered. I am not sure how Dark is going to get her lead characters to fall in love in less time than 4 days. It gives the phrase  - whirlwind romance - a whole new meaning. Bad guys, deep dark secrets and hot and steamy are the themes of this urban fantasy.

My final book for this week was A Lady Can Never Be Too Curious by Mary Wine. I found this book on my Amazon recommendations and I read a number of positive reviews about it. It was sufficiently steampunky that I thought I would be sure to like it. Well....lets just say by 75% into the book I gave up and read the last page. The story is set in what sounded like the late 1800s in England where who you were and how you acted in polite society was paramount. When the young aristo Janette finds herself caught between 2 warring factions of .....well that is it....I was never sure what they were but it had something to do with crystals. Needless to say there is a young man involved who gets Janette's corset all a quiver. Had she spent as much time thinking of her personal safety as she did about the hunky Darius then it might have been a better book!

That is all for me for this week. I have a few books to clear off my TBR in these early months of 2015 so until next week, Happy Reading.


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