The final segment of the Honey Badger Chronicles pairs middle sister Max MacKilligan with an oblivious jaguar shifter who attempts to save her and winds up finding himself.
When an attempted kidnapping of honey badger shifter Max goes south, ZeZé Vargas, one of the kidnappers who's a shifter though he doesn't know it, tries to protect her and is injured. After Max takes ZeZé home to New York and he heals, she's prepared to turn him loose, but her older sister, Charlie, demands she take some responsibility and help Zé navigate his new reality. “You brought him here, Max. You told him the truth. Now you need to deal with the repercussions of those actions.” Zé soon learns how unique the MacKilligan half sisters are. Fiercely loyal and superlethal when they choose to be, they mostly want to be left in peace. However, thanks to their idiot father and Max’s criminal mother, who’s recently escaped from prison, everyone wants something from them—information, money, or skills, for instance—pitting them against mercenaries, hostile family members, and even law enforcement. In the midst of the chaos, Zé begins to make sense of the sisters’ odd relationships with each other and the vast, unexpected network of friends and allies around them, and for the first time, he feels at home in his own skin and right where he’s supposed to be, with Max by his side. Laurenston ends the MacKilligan sisters trilogy with a flourish, blending humor, action, and romance in her own inimitable and fabulous fashion, and she reminds us that family can be blood or choice and that different races (Max is half Chinese; Charlie is African American; Zé is Latino) and species can get along when they decide to, aided at times by baked goods. A sprawling cast of shifters combined with an intricate, complex plot can occasionally be confusing, but everything comes together in the end, and the characters, worldbuilding, and storytelling are vivid, inventive, and completely entertaining.
A wild, brilliant ride.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1440-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE | PARANORMAL ROMANCE | FANTASY & SCI-FI ROMANCE
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A clever, romantic, sexy love story.
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The much-loved royal romance genre gets a fun and refreshing update in McQuiston’s debut.
Alex Claremont-Diaz, son of the American President Ellen Claremont, knows one thing for sure: He hates Henry, the British prince to whom he is always compared. He lives for their verbal sparring matches, but when one of their fights at a royal wedding goes a bit too far, they end up falling into a wedding cake and making tabloid headlines. An international scandal could ruin Alex’s mother’s chances for re-election, so it’s time for damage control. The plan? Alex and Henry must pretend to be best friends, giving the tabloids pictures of their bromance and neutralizing the threat to Ellen's presidency. But after a few photo ops with Henry, Alex starts to realize that the passionate anger he feels toward him might be a cover for regular old passion. There are, naturally, a million roadblocks between their first kiss and their happily-ever-after—how can American political royalty and actual British royalty ever be together? How can they navigate being open about their sexualities (Alex is bisexual; Henry is gay) in their very public and very scrutinized roles? Alex and Henry must decide if they’ll risk their futures, their families, and their careers to take a chance on happiness. Although the story’s premise might be a fantasy—it takes place in a world in which a divorced-mom Texan Democrat won the 2016 election—the emotions are all real. The love affair between Alex and Henry is intense and romantic, made all the more so by the inclusion of their poetic emails that manage to be both funny and steamy. McQuiston’s strength is in dialogue; her characters speak in hilarious rapid-fire bursts with plenty of “likes,” “ums,” creative punctuation, and pop-culture references, sounding like smarter, funnier versions of real people. Although Alex and Henry’s relationship is the heart of the story, their friends and family members are all rich, well-drawn characters, and their respective worlds feel both realistic and larger-than-life.
A clever, romantic, sexy love story.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31677-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE | LBGTQ
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A young woman in hiding from the Russian mob faces a difficult decision when she falls in love with a cop.
Abigail, 28, lives alone in the bucolic hamlet of Bickford, Ark., in an isolated house, fortified with firearms, a state-of-the-art alarm system and a vicious dog named Bert. When the town’s genial police chief, Brooks, suspects Abigail is packing while shopping for gourmet groceries, his curiosity soon morphs into courtship. Although she finds herself drawn to Brooks and to his welcoming, bohemian family, Abigail dares not reveal that her real name is Liz—which is not the only way in which she appears to be Roberts’ answer to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Gifted with an eidetic memory, an IQ over 200 and an affinity for cool, calculated mayhem, Liz/Abigail is a skilled hacker and a highly paid security consultant. In her spare time she investigates the Russian mob and the crooked federal agents who are responsible for her current predicament; whenever possible, she throws virtual monkey wrenches into the mob’s Internet scams. When she witnesses an altercation between Brooks and the wastrel son of a local magnate, she’s thrust back into the horror of the last time she witnessed a crime. At 16, rebelling against an unloving, controlling mother, Liz and a girlfriend, Julie, visited a Chicago nightclub run by the Russian Mafia, where Ilya, son of gang kingpin Sergei, and Alexi, a cousin, seduced them with Cosmos. Later, at Alexi’s lakeside home, Liz was an unseen witness to a hit on Alexi by Sergei’s enforcers, who also killed Julie. Managing to escape, Liz was forced to run again when two dirty FBI agents destroyed her safe house and murdered her guards. A person of interest to both the Feds and the mob, she’s been on the lam for 12 years. Before they can marry, Brooks must help Liz come in from the cold.
A promising start to a series, provided Roberts can flesh out her derivative heroine.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15912-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL ROMANCE | ROMANCE
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