Blurb: Months ago, former model Reed Emerson was nearly killed in a car accident. While on a trip to celebrate his recovery, he gets lost in the woods and meets an unusual wolf. When the animal turns out to be more than just a wolf, Reed is astonished and a little afraid.
Werewolf Ethan Amhurst has been alone a long time. Finding Reed lost on his property seems to be a stroke of luck. He wants to show Reed that his scars don’t matter, but can there be any future for a werewolf and a scarred ex-model?

Review: After being so enthusiastic about “Fool for Love” I decided to try out another book by Cassandra Gold, this time a paranormal story with a werewolf. Add a scarred hero as the second protagonist and you have a story that I’m bound to like.

The story goes medias in res with Reed being lost and meeting Ethan, just he doesn’t know it. We only learn what happened to him further on when he confides in Ethan; just what I like, no long prologue and no backstory to go through.

Reed’s reaction to Ethan’s revelation that he is the wolf is pretty astonishing. If I met a man and he told me he was the wolf I slept side by side with last night I’d be more than a little surprised. But I suppose on 47 pages you can’t squeeze in too much misgivings about a werewolf. You either take it or leave it. The slight misunderstanding as to Ethan’s motive to let Reed go so easily is getting cleared up rather quickly with the help of the standard jerk-y ex boyfriend.

There is still a question or two that wasn’t answered. We hardly know anything about Ethan. There is mentioning of the Elders who are against human / were relationships as a rule, but that’s about it. Does he always live in his cabin in the forest?  As far as I know (my knowledge all derives from PNR, but I have to start somewhere) werewolves usually have some sort of pack continuously meddling in everybody’s affairs. Where is it?

But all that aside, I really liked the story. If you like weres, paranormal and a straight storyline with no ramifications, this is great for you.

Available at Cobblestone Press

Synopsis: Lexis, a vampire, gets a little too conceited and confident and pisses his elders off. As a punishment his coven turns against him, blinds him and leaves him for dead. He gets captured by humans and, together with other supernatural beings, is being experimented upon in some institution. When some of his fellow inmates make it possible to escape he’d rather stay behind and just die. However, Bryce, a werewolf, has other plans and drags him along. Bryce wants to avenge Lexis – against Lexis’ will -, but as a result of this well-meaning action, his old coven captures Lexis to finish him off for good.

Review: OK, this was different. The whole story is being told in first person. I usually don’t like that I only get one person’s angle, but from an excerpt I knew already that the story was told from Lexis’ point of view. So no complaints here. What was strange for me was that Lexis also is blind, so we never receive any visual impressions, but only Lexis’ feelings and what he experiences by touch or from hearing.
Bryce is totally smitten with Lexis, a fact that Lexis doesn’t recognize. He is totally unaware of his own appeal. On the other hand he feels dependent on Bryce and is quite taken with him as well. The love scenes are hot (I wouldn’t expect anything else) and took some getting used to. The warning on the shop site that the story contained sex in shifted form made me wonder whether I’d like it at all (given my opinion about the Wolf Tales by Kate Douglas), but I went for it anyway. So once I got over the fact that Bryce turned at some point to a certain degree the scenes were quite good, but nothing I’d like to read repeatedly.

What I liked was Bryce’s dedication to support Lexis and his determination to avenge him and help him restore his eyesight. Even though Lexis doesn’t recognize this himself and even fights it, it is just what he needs. Those two certainly make an interesting couple. All in all, this was a good read and the unique perspective made it quite extraordinary.

Available at Loose ID

[rating: 3]

I would never have thought that I’d read a book for young adults. I resisted Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series for quite some time, but since the 4th book came out and the discussion started to become lively again, I just had to give it a try. I was told you either hate or love the book(s) and I wanted to find out what it was for me.

Well, obviously times have changed since I was a young adult. Where young girls nowadays are reading Twilight (and go totally nuts about it) I was reading the O’Sullivan Twins by Enid Blyton, LOL. I don’t know whether I’d like my early teen daughter – if I had one – to read Twilight. Even though there is no sex in the book, for reasons other than the couple wouldn’t love to have sex, it is quite a sensual book.

The story is about a new student in Forks, WA, Bella Swan (what a name, can you get more obvious?), who falls in love with a fellow student, Edward. He and his siblings are outsiders in their high school, and Bella is intrigued by him. When Edwards rescues her with superhuman speed and power from an accident she suspects he’s more than meets the eye. You guessed it, he’s a vampire. They fall in love, face some adversary and come out on top – for now. Bella wants Edward to turn her into a vampire, but he refuses and they come to an impasse over this.

I don’t know what to think of Bella. She is a total klutz, Edwards continuously has to rescue her from one accident or other; how she survived her first 17 years is a mystery to me. She has no life whatsoever, apart from Edward. She has no hobbies. Since she is new in Forks, she only made a few friends right at the beginning, but neglects them very soon after she gets entangled with Edward and his vampire "family". Her father, who she lives with now, uses her as a housemaid, she cooks his dinner every night, tidies up, does the laundry…..Excuse me? He has been living alone for a number of years and now that Bella is here he doesn’t lift a finger any more?  I really hope that young girls don’t read this book and think that this is how a girl’s life should be.

I am a sucker for boring books without a lot of external interference and with a lot of internal monologue, so this book was written for me. I enjoyed reading it a lot and got the other three books in the series as well. I loved Edward, even though I could have done with a bit less Bella gushing over him. How often can you say that someone is gorgeous and perfect without being repetitive? I get it.

Oh, and about the glitter part that everybody is so up in arms about. Yeah, ok, Ms. Meyer’s vampire glitter when they go out in direct sun light. So what? Every author makes up their own little vampire world, and if for her, they glitter, what is it to me? Edward and the others have to be able to walk in daylight in order to make the story work. If she’s thrown in a little glitter without explaining why, who the hell cares? After all it is book targeted at GIRLS, and we all love glitter, LOL. I don’t want to read a scientific essay about the reasons for it.

The book is told in first person from Bella’s point of view, which I usually don’t care for. I’d rather see both sides. Stephenie Meyer had planned to write another book about the same story from Edward’s point of view, Midnight Sun, but some thief stole and posted the unfinished manuscript on the net. The book is on hold for now. Ms. Meyer has posted that manuscript now on her own site so interested readers can read the first 250 odd pages.

Want to read more reviews?
This book has also been reviewed at Literary Escapism.

Circus of the Damned is the 3rd book in the series. I have no idea why I’m still reading on, I must be under some sort of spell, I have no other explanation. Anita is starting to seriously get on my nerves. I want to slap her on at least every other page for being the tough girl that she is. What’s wrong with that woman?
Her constant denial of that she feels somewhat attracted to Jean-Claude is extremely annoying once more. She is a professional zombie raiser and necromancer, she continuously stresses her "affinity" towards the dead, yet going out with a "walking corpse" (i.e. vampire) is totally not her cup of tea. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t get that.
In the book two master vampires are fighting for supremacy in the city and she is (once more) getting caught in the middle of it all. The two masters in question are Jean-Claude, whom she knows to be a halfway decent fellow and a certain Mr. Oliver of whom she knows nothing whatsoever. She meets him once and finds he is a nice guy. Based on the one hour meeting – during which he shows remarkable power – she decides that she will betray Jean-Claude and give his identity and location to Mr. Oliver. Bad judgement because Mr. Oliver turns out to be not so nice after all, but then – when the shit hits the fan she does say to Jean-Claude that she is sorry. That must count for something, no? Only through her stout-hearted actions the evil ones are killed and Jean-Claude is rescued, so that makes it all good again. Why Jean-Claude doesn’t give that woman a wide berth after that incident is beyond me.

Apart from all those personality issues I find the idea of having Mr. Oliver dress up like a clown for the final showdown at the circus extremely trite. It just reminds me of Stephen King or maybe Batman. Why do the evil ones always dress up as clowns? Admittedly clowns are pretty frightening, but the idea is so old and hackneyed, it’s time to look for some other fancy dress.

And then Richard….What’s wrong with that guy being attracted to Anita? What on earth are they talking about while they are dating? My reckoning: the conversation centers around whether Anita prefers to carry her gun in a holster under her shoulder or at the small of her back and whether a Browning whatever is preferabe to a Firestar whatever. Then there is the important question to be answered whether to wear a cardigan or a shirt to hide the gun. God, the woman is so boring, it hurts.

BTW, if anybody is wondering about the book titles. They are all various pubs, bars and other locations in the area. Guilty Pleasures is Jean -Claude’s night club, The laughing corpse is a comedy club (owned by Jean-Claude) and the Circus of the Damned is a circus or rather supernatural freak show, managed by – you guessed it – Jean Claude. But hope is near, the Lunatic Café, the next book’s title, is not affiliated with Jean-Claude in any way.

This book started the whole idea of this blog. I don’t think I’ve ever disliked a hero/heroine in a book this much. We’ve had  the whole Anita Blake series for a long time at home. John read them  – he’s all into that vampire stuff -, but stopped reading them when they started to turn into some sort of sex novel around volume no. 9 or 10. When I found out there was the Paranormal Romance genre out there I started reading some books and really liked them. Eventually John told me about LKH and I started to read the Anita Blake series.
"The laughing corpse" is the second Anita Blake book that I have read (after "Guilty pleasures") and I am not impressed with it.
Anita Blake is a self-righteous, supposedly cool, totally unlikeable person. Her attitude is aggravating to say the least. She doesn’t know when to shut her mouth, pisses the wrong people off at the wrong time and still comes out of every confrontation unharmed.

The descriptions of the murder scenes in the book are gross. To describe the scene once is necessary, but to describe the same stuff again and again is redundant. I’m getting the picture after the first time.

The books are called "vampire hunter novels", yet so far Anita hasn’t hunted any vampires. Not that I think that vampires need to be hunted per se, but a bit of vampire interaction would be nice. In the first book the "vampire hunter" actually worked FOR the vampires and in the second one there were hardly any vampires.
Jean-Claude was only put in as a minor supporting actor. The whole book deals with zombies of all kinds – a topic that doesn’t do it for me at all.

*SPOILERS*
What annoyed me most was:
- that Anita found out that raising a dead animator has very bad consequences and that that zombie can’t be ontrolled by the one who raised it. Nevertheless she doesn’t hesitate to – or even think about it – raise a whole graveyard, meaning loads and loads of zombies she doesn’t know anything about. What if there are former animators among them?
- that at first Anita wants to bring down Dominga Salvador with legal means and only in case those would fail she would let John Burke deal with her. That resolution didn’t last for long, because as soon as she realizes that Dominga got out on bail (something which is pretty much inside the legal system, even though she obviously reached that by bribery) she decided it’s time to have her killed by the numeours zombies she just raised. Nice double standard.

Guess this book wasn’t for me. At. All.