review 1: What happens when you mix a psychotic assassin, a sharp tempered doctor, and a gorgeous sweetie of a chef?Wow. Sometimes a book just hits with you, and this is what happened here. It's a funny thing, because the book had its problems. My biggest was that the overly inflected narration reads like an unending reaction shot. That can be great at times, because the characters' voices are very distinct and often hilarious, but unfortunately here it results in a kind of perennial narrative coyness. Specifics about this world are only given in tiny bits and pieces, and key points are often tossed out where they're not particularly helpful. The effect is unnecessarily frustrating and opaque, and means the sci-fi aspects and the world itself never come fully into focus. There ar... moree still a lot of things about the world I don't understand, including even the point of the mission Lewell'yn was on, or the role of this lost tribe. The book is listed as the first in a series, but until that sequel appears, the reader is left with a lot of questions. That being said, this has to be my favorite, and I mean FAVORITE, ménage story I've ever read. This, I now understand, is how you write a threesome. The three men in the story are very different, but they are each fully drawn and given full importance in the story, and each is definitely more than he seems. Crucially, the dynamic between them in every permutation could not be more highly charged. I liked Kayron the best, but Lewell'yn is an absolutely smoldering alpha, and Tian is especially successful in the (very difficult to pull off) role of virginal twink. Luckily for my sanity, Lewell'yn is the quintessential loose canon, who never loses his intensity or descends (oh horror) into gooey marshmallow lurve after he accepts his feelings for (and impregnates) his two lovers, but remains volatile and oh-so-dominant til the end. The whole book serves as a helpful reminder that in the best erotic writing, scenes with no actual sex are as hot or hotter than scenes with full-frontal X-rated action--and happily for my smutty imagination, there are plenty of hints of off-screen scenarios that leave even the margins steamed up. So the bottom line is, the sci-fi may fall short, but the blistering ménage relationship more than makes up for it. I'm already willing to check the favorite/reread box for this one. And can we get the damned sequel, like, yesterday! review 2: I really enjoyed the story, though some of the brogue was a bit too thick and rather distracting. The characters are unique, particularly Lewell'yn, and also the race as a whole. There are several questions left at the end of the story which I hope will be covered in the rest of the series, but this felt complete. (They were questions I could live with not knowing the answers to right now, but I expect to see them come back up in later stories.)The one thing that rather pissed me off was that two of the MCs kept looking at other men with interest. And I don't mean that they're looking at someone else and thinking "he's hot," which doesn't bother me (that's normal), but rather that they're thinking "he's hot" AND giving them serious consideration when they've barely been with their current men more than a few days (or weeks) and they're supposed to be super-hot for each other. I just found that totally unappealing. And I don't really think it was the intent, just how it came out to me. Whatever. YMMV.In general, the descriptive language felt a bit over the top in some places. I pulled out the dictionary a few times. (Not sure if that's a compliment or a detriment. Suppose that depends on one's mood. Felt like a detriment in this case, which I suppose is why I'm mentioning it, but I readily admit that last typo I saw right at the end of the story put me in a bad mood, so I may be in a worse place mentally than I would have been otherwise. I had the thought before coming across that issue, though, so maybe it's still how it felt.)And there weren't that many typos in this (or rather, the brogue was so thick in some places you wouldn't notice them if they were), but there were some that just leapt off the page so heinously that it seemed like there were more than there actually were. It was annoying, whichever it was.All in all, the characters and the story are definitely worth the read. I'm going to chalk the issues up to mine and perceived more than actual. I'll definitely read the rest of the series because I enjoyed the read. (Go easier on the special language though, please.) less
