starsaga
a beautiful story about two people struggling to love again, and finally the villain gets offed!!!This was the best of all the books. For two big reasons, one that the love story rang true, there was a big buildup for this love story in the previous books and perhaps because of this, it was the best of the lot. Emily was a sweetheart and I saw how she could love Luke because he was amazing in this book (not so much in the previous books, though). The uber-villain is finally dealt with at the end of the book with some odd moments, the villain felt "abandoned" by the hero, his CIA trainer, and that was the big betrayal. I did not buy into this but I was just glad this was over. I would recommend this book for the love story even as a standalone.
 - Kristen Ashley)
Tedious.Ally the heroine was too tomboyish to be a heroine in a KA book. I did not like her at all from previous books and this one did not change my mind about her. Ren was great in the beginning but turned into a milquetoast hero after the 20% mark. This was disappointing because clearly he was not this one-dimensional before. Even if his book had to be written it should not have been within the context of Ally's constant self-validation as a rock-chick and a PI, it made her very seem just nosy and clique-ish and hardly someone I want to read about as a heroine. My least favorite of all the Rock Chick books by KA, the self-referencing was cringe-worthy and distracting to say the least.
The most dramatic, action packed in this series, yet an emotional roller-coaster!This book truly stripped Zane and Ty of all layers. When they were forced to confront each other and do some serious navel-gazing, all done on the fly while terrible baddies are gunning for them both, not to mention kidney stones and voodoo dolls, they do it with drama. I actually like that about our boys....lol, I like that they are not cardboard cutouts of what one would expect from agent-spy types. Quite the contrary, in this book, we get to go on a trip with them to madness and back, with an extremely convoluted plot and villains who like mind-games. The relationship between the friends of Ty, Nick and the others was interesting to see as it was tested time and time again, but nothing was tested more than the relationship of Ty and Zane. I don't know if I believed the reconciliation, it was too easy for what had passed but I believe this author will be able to convince me with the next book, that these two had grown from the bad experience to love each other the way they do in my fantasy. I am amazed at Abigail Roux's ability to take me on an emotional ride with her characters, to the point, where I don't want to let this 7th book be the last one until we get the next. But alas, it is, and I am waiting breathlessly for the coming book about Zane and Ty. I recommend this book and this series to anyone who likes a love story that grabs you by the heartstrings and will not let go.
3.5 stars, original sci-fi but slightly overdone.I loved most of EA's kindred books and this is something along that scheme, but also different. I liked K and Boone, they were really sweet and in the beginning half of the book, I laughed at the funny things that happened and I worried about all the difficulties and issue they would face. Slowly and steadily though, the book progresses through space and it seemed as if everyone was the villain and these two could just not get a break. The story became a little drawn out and lecture-y with all the pondering about cycles and suits for emotional damping etc. and this went on for too long. This book was not as hot as the others that EA writes but in its own way has that sense-of-the-forbidden thrill about it. All in all, a good book and I am always going to read EA's books but this one may not go onto my re-read shelf as other from EA have.
Pretty awful for a short book....read it if you like awkward phrasing and unlikeable characters.Basically, I did not like the characters of Mikayla and Gage. I dislike heroines who are so macho that major portions of the book are written as a tribute to their so-called badass abilities. Borrrrring!! This book was also poorly written, phrases referring to her having a talent for death, what is that? She also fought the good fight? Lame! All in all, i don't recco this book, as erotica, there was precious little, as suspense, it was muddled and hardly gripping, as romance, not in the least.
Lean on Me (The Mackay Sisters, #2)
Adorable story with a sweet hero!I loved Matt, I love reading about a hero that gets a little harried and crazy in his pursuit of his girl. And that is what Matt did. He was adorably confused but no less determined to get Lori to date him and see him. I think I may know those crazy gossipy people in the book, doesn't everyone have someone like that in their lives, they frustrate me while they try to make up stories if nothing is really happening that is gossip-worthy according to them and reading about them in this book just cracked me up all along.
I love this author's work, she can make a story sweet but really hot and I love the characters in all her contemporary books, I have read them all.
 - Kaylea Cross)
2.5 stars,ok love story, awful suspense story,I think I might have started with the wrong book, but I have been wanting to read this author's books for ages and I thought, best to go with the first. I was wrong. Read this at the risk of being bored out of your mind with a heroine who is such a victim, it is painful to read. The hero was alright, but another of those promiscuous types who can't understand why no one trusts him. The villain was equally morbid and stereotypical, just boring. I think this author can write better, but I wouldn't know from this book, where she managed to make the book both frustratingly slow and unnecessarily random.
A sweet story, but too short for me to love it.This book is a good solid story, romance with some erotica and emotion. But it was too short to feel anything much for the characters. Also because of the length, everything happened too fast, so i am unconvinced of the HEA the author is implying.
Whom to love more, the badass spy guy or the sweetheart? Both of them, of course!!Another great book from this author. I loved how the relationship between Cameron and Julian developed and all with this mysterious suspense in the background, of someone's gonna get hurt and I don't want it to be you!! I loved the humour, the push and pull of the emotions, cats and puppies are always welcome and of course, the flowing writing style of this author.
What did not please me was the long separation, I did not understand how that helped the storyline, and it frustrated me to the point that when the final climactic scene came around all I wanted to do was skip to the end to see these two back together again. So, with a few not so great parts to this story, overall, I did enjoy it and would recommend this book to anyone who wants to read about a romance infused with humour and action, between two very different people and their struggle to be together.
Not for the faint of heart, but a love story nevertheless.Most of this book, was raw, tough and almost like an emotional obstacle course. For the characters and for me as a reader. This was not a book for comfort reading and there was no lightness to this book. It was all heavy themes of bondage, torture, kidnapping, burn and all written to somehow pull down the storyline to the grimmest of human relationships and emotion. Yet, the shining light in all of this was how the book actually started with Jay and Charlee meeting for just one hour and that was enough to change them and their world. The story was beautifully told around these two people and their need to be together and how they paid a price for it. It was so compelling that even the people around them saw it as a rare and simple love and supported it so completely.
Plotwise, the action part of the story seemed poorly strung together, but that is not why I read this book. The villain was one of those uber-rich, uber-cruel, uber-powerful.....well he was just an uber-villain shall we say, but why he was that way was not explored and perhaps not the point of the story. I was ok with that because anyone so mean does not deserve to have more than a few sentences written about him, but it would have been more gripping as a suspense story had I known his back-story.
These two characters, Charlee and Jay will stay with me for a long time, they were troubled yet sweet to each other, in a way that is rare, for that I give this book and this author, 5 shiny, tattooed, rockin' stars!
Bland but a sweet love between friends theme,I love this theme, of friends becoming lovers and finding out that what they had been looking for was in front of them all along. I love a little angst and worry on the part of the two when they do come together and think of what it means for them for the rest of their lives. In that sense this book was well done. What I did not care for in the book was the extensive internal dialogue, it went on and on to the point where I was just turning pages in order to find out where the actual dialogue would begin again. This happened a few times in this book and made the flow of the story weird. I think if the book had been written about people who were older and slightly wiser I think the book would have been more evocative, as it was, it was a sweet book about two very nice but not memorable people.
I can't imagine anyone reading this and not falling head over heels for Eric!I haven't come across a sweet man like Eric Sticks, in a long long while. I wish a lot more people were like this character, it would make for a better world, I think. i adored this book and both Reb and Eric are among the sweetest, quite muddled, highly libidinous characters, that I will have no choice but to remember for sometime to come, their antics male it so. The smexing is on the Olympic scale, if there were such a thing.....there was so much of it. Surprisingly though, it did not read as pure erotica to me, because the emotional connection was there from the start. i just love it when a hero sees his woman for the first time and then there's no stopping him in his pursuit. What a wild ride though. Not much happens as a plot in the book, but I did not miss the convolutions that sometimes distract from the romance. this book, was for me, just right and a keeper in this series.
So done with MB, if you're looking for romance with zero chemistry, this is your book!,This was a bad read. Its never a good thing if while I am reading, every other page and scene, makes me think 'WEIRD!'. This was primarily because of the lack of chemistry between whatzisface and Josie. No wonder, because although he's supposed to be hot yet laid back, he speaks without pronouns when referring to himself. He is so arrogant that he does not need to. There is so much talk about emotions between the men, even while they are flipping each other off and saying, we need to speak less of our emotions. There was so much talk about girl's night out, it seemed that was the only event to look forward to in the book. It was not realistic in the least and even in a fiction story, this went too far. I suppose, in this series and now in a lot of others too, there a sense of alpha-maleness and cute-girliness that appears on loan from Kristen Ashley style books, which is fine, except that the closeness of the scenes and the conversation style seems as if this author might be trying to hard. It is amazing to me that this is the same person who wrote the sweet series. She should have just stopped there.
In any case, in this book, if you can distract yourself from whatzisface's conversation style and the cliched storyline, there is little else to entertain in the rest of the story. The bdsm elements primarily consist of saying, do you trust me, yes, I do and follow up beatings and croppings. At one time, whatzisface even says to her, when she is concerned about feeling pain "put aside the pain, baby". Oh really? How eloquent, Mr.Dom, yah, that's gonna work out really well. At the end, reading this book just convinced me that, Maya Banks, is done with writing good books and I will not be bothering to read anymore books from her.
I cannot recommend this book, the heroine was awful.The title of my review says it all, if I cannot like the heroine, that pretty much ruins a romance for me. This storyline has been told before many many times, and I always enjoy reading it or watching, such as in the movie Pretty woman, but in this case, Grey the heroine was too reactionary to her father and certainly too self-absorbed when she was with Dawson. The part of the proposal and the back door birthday present was beyond believable and trite to the point of painfulness, pardon the pun. If the book had stopped somewhere before these things happened, I think I might have even liked it slightly. I should have dnf-ed it at 80%.
superb! fresh, exciting and with just the right touch of angst.I have adored these books and more than anything else, I respect this author's work for keeping the stories moving, fresh and ridiculously hot. Sherlock Holmes and James Watson are my favorite detective-friend coupling and these guys may be my second favorite. I loved the introduction of Annie and Harrison, the dad. They were great, but that Beverly, could someone do us all a favor and detach her from the stick she is impaled on? She was worse than the villains in this book!! It seems to me that the women that are awful in these books like Zane's mom and the profiler from the first book are just too evil to be believed. There are those that are kind like Mara and Annie and they save these books from only showing women as one-dimensional characters who appear to be mostly barmaids for 1NSs, macho FBI agents or just randomly fawning all over these good-looking men. I was so glad that once again these two men showed they were there for each other, time and time again, which made my heart happy and I think this was one more excellent addition to this series.
So good, so satisfying, cant wait to read the next!I thought this book would be full of cliches, but it was not. It was refreshing to read about a growing love between these two hard-nosed men with macho jobs and life-styles. Who knew? For once, I got a nice long......book, i am talking about the length of the book, not anything else, but there was also a lot of passion and bodycontact in this book and it reads well, phew!
The men seemed atypical to me, their expressions and body language, especially when they were alone, were almost feminine and yielding. But, i enjoyed it, because it seemed to come from the heart and this author team also write from the heart, that was clear.
I read this book on the recommendation of my amazon buddies and I am not sorry, in fact I am going on to read the next one in this series, and the next, and the next. This book made me happy to read it and look forward to more.
