Steamy reads with a dollop of magic, mystery and hot... hot men

Didn't make it very far into this one before hurling it onto my teetering DNF pile. Just no... the blurb sounded great but what I read? The heroine? Just made me want to find the nearest wall and start banging my head - so as life is too short - I with wanton glee wave the white flag... DNF and I don't care.

Blurb promised great things - sounded like a fresh and interesting take. The execution though? Hated the heroine, she irked me and was TSTL, making bad choices and failing to follow through.
Disliked the approach, story, lead. Pretty much everything in fact.

Best thing about this book - the cover
The worst thing - the heroine, India Black. I had no problems with the main character being a Madam (running a brothel) what I did have a problem with is her unfounded superiority complex. She constantly refers to her working girls as 'bints' - which is the equivalent of calling them the 'C' word. India constantly harps on about her cooks drinking - but knocks back whiskey like its going out of style. And to say she has ill will towards her clients doesn't even begin to touch on the contempt she feels for them.
There are very few people she does like and no one she respects - perhaps she has good reason for her attitude but with absolutely no background (why/how did she become a whore? How did she claw her way up to owning her own place?) her behaviour/thoughts just come off as harsh and rather hypocritical.
India's motivation for going after the 'missing' case is also questionable once she tries and fails at the Russian party. Trying to rub French's nose in her victory of recovering it, is not enough of an explanation as to why she leaves her brothel unattended (after going to great pains to tell us earlier how incompetent her staff were - and that they would steal her blind if she wasn't there to watch them....?)
So she hangs around for hours outside in the freezing cold, tells lie after lie, steals a maid's uniform, shimmies along a ledge, falls to the ground, shimmies up a drain pipe...etc etc. SEE - her motivation just does not make sense for the time and effort she is expending.

I like the idea - and I really wanted to like this more - but the main character and the execution of the story killed off any goodwill I had for this book.

Where the first book in this series "Enemy Within" trod new ground and provided an exciting plot and intriguing characters this second book is a bitter disappointment. And is essentially way too similar in story line as the first book, failing to bring anything new or interesting to the reader. Worse, while I'm not a reader that typically needs every little detail explained I found huge gaps this time in my understanding of exactly just what was going on and why. Whilst I appreciated the female lead, finding her strong and capable with fantastic lethal skills it is never explained why she failed to step up in the first book when the crew was continually in mortal danger. Plus the male leads back story appeared to get lost in the telling and I was never quite sure of what it meant that he was a "predator".
Contributing to the confusion was the number of groups that continuously pop up & disappear throughout the book, all with confusing agendas, agents, double agents, allies, enemies etc. It became quite tiresome trying to remember or figure out exactly who everyone is.
The ending of the book is also rather abrupt. For a while I wasn't sure if there weren't pages missing as we seemed to go from action two pages before, then everything is suddenly resolved and the story just ends.

If there is a third book I will definitely be waiting for my library to purchase a copy as I won't be wasting my money any further on this series.

Whilst I kind of liked book 1 - enough to buy book 2 anyway. This second in the series fell over in a big heap for me.
Threw it on the DNF pile at the 50% mark.
I began to actively hate the h, as the story progressed and found myself rolling my eyes every second page as I just didn't like the story/plotting, direction this 2nd book was taking the series - I'm opting out.

This series has become an exercise in frustration. The author appears to be caught in a number of endless loops:
- Celia selflessly putting everyone else's needs before her own
- Her sisters putting their bro-ho hunks before Celia's happiness. They never take a stand against the elders on her behalf or ask their men/mates to. Nor do they ever rip into Aric for being hot/cold, instead everyone seems to be all too understanding of HIS pain, since he's the alpha, but no one seems to give a damn about Celia's pain.
- Celia is constantly humiliated, by her own powers (seriously an eagle with breasts?) and by her friends and her sisters' hunks insensitive thoughtless comments (which her sisters should be slapping them in the face for, but never do)
- Men constantly treat Celia like dirt, no matter how much they say they love/need her. The vampire Misha has constant sex with others and rubbing her face in it makes no sense. Aric's alpha male who says one thing, does another, is constantly hot and then cold. Celia's constant does he love me? Why is he acting so cold? Just mind-boggingly frustrating.
- The endless arguments everytime a dangerous situation comes up, the alpha males forbidding the sisters to get involved, lots of talk and posturing until the sisters pretty much do what they were going to do all along
- The oh so obvious bad guys, might as well wear neon signs the moment they appear as there is no subtly to them what so ever, which would be fine if this series was still a romance, now it's become action/adventure - so it needs much more clever plotting.
- Stuff happens that makes no sense and just makes Celia look even weaker than she already is; the vampire wedding for instance in which Celia's bullied to go along with. Sorry what? She says she's in love with Aric but continuously does all this stuff with Misha.
Seriously this series has become a retread of the same action and reactions over and over again. Worst of all Celia as the main character has become a sad wuss of a woman, ultra dependent upon Aric. Every time he gives her a cold look she bursts into tears, only to then be oh so happy when he tells her (for the twentieth time) I had to be mean to you in front of the others so no one would guess my true feelings.
Please Cecy - break the cycle - no one else can do it for you.

Liked the idea - didn't appreciate the execution. The h was really hard to root for and by the end didn't care if she lived or died.

Pockets of gripping intrigue between yawning stretches of utter boredom.
Instead of making this a scattergun approach with a little bit of political intrigue, a little bit of historical drama, a little bit of romance, a little bit of magic - failing to combine all these elements the author needed to just pick one genre and stick to it.
Great idea - the convent raising female assassins but it doesn't go far enough, instead the author makes the heroine in this book a bit wishy washy at times as she succumbs to romance.

Light romantic read - just what I was in the mood for. Whilst I always wanted to read the story of Aiden and Cordie getting together this execution left me a little bit flat. Aiden was too strong and independent - author failed to prove to me that they were a really good match.
And the book blurb is kind of a misrepresentation of the story - really this book is about Cordie discovering her mother didn't die when she was a baby but abandoned her - the whole congressman part of the story is really the c plot.

To compare this book to Graceling? NO WAY.
This is fluff... an annoying fluff at that.
The first three chapters or so are excellent. We meet our heroine, she's all kind of bad, calculating how to kill everyone she meets in an instant. After spending a year in the mines after being betrayed she's rightfully a little pissed off.
Then the story literally falls off a cliff -
Our heroine never does anything all that great or special to prove why she was considered the GREATEST most FEARED assassin in the land.
She's terrified of the king - to the point she's practically pissing the carpet.
All the other competitors are supposedly just run of the mill soldiers or thieves but they are supposedly her competitors? So, no tension.
We have all these competitions - but the author too often tells us the end result and glosses over them - so no tension there.
And is the h, is the biggest tease ever, as she flirts and uses both Chaol and the Prince - then cuts the cord when she gets the gig.

This was a mess, great premise but our heroine never lives up to the hype. I loathe books where I'm told the h is kick ass then she promptly dissolves into a girlish puddle. And sorry, but the girl was betrayed, surely revenge was the only thing keeping her going in the prison mines but does she ever mention it again? Nope.
All hype - no delivery.

I did enjoy this read. Our h is dogged and determined but she's also naïve and kind of a Pollyanna. Which was okay at the start of the book but as betrayal upon betrayal is heaped upon her, as she uncovers all the lies and atrocities being committed in her city - it's a little surprising she doesn't become a little hardened, a little more suspicious.
I liked the strong, pretty much mono-syllabic, kill rather than chat H. And you kind of get why he is drawn much against his will to the h.
The merry band of followers our h collects along the way could have been fleshed out more. But perhaps their back stories will be related in future books.
The bad guys - were all done very well.
But where the story really fell down for me was the Emperor. He seemed so childish, limp and it became difficult to understand why our gang would want to risk their lives to keep him in power. I needed him to be smarter, more subversive - someone I would root for.

Am still undecided as to whether I'll pursue this series further.

Limp effort. h couldn't be more of a stereotype if she tried. And the H, what a one dimensional piece of cardboard.
Even the sex scene was plodding.
Great blurb - lousy execution of the idea

Cool and different

This started off well, interesting dystopian frozen world. But too many inconsistencies (seriously, everyone is incredibly poor but our heroes have all the gas in the world to drive around both a car and a boat?) and every time a conversation was started it would end abruptly as some weirdness would occur - stuck tires, something in the road, big game hunters, thrillers (roll my eyes on this one), military etc etc.
The story stopped and started, jerking me along with it.
There was the occasional ick factor when I remembered how old everyone was - sixteen year old bride? - I know the groom is also young but it still bothered me.
The story twisted and turned, it was one thing, then it was another, more and more magical groups were loaded on - rather like gasoline thrown onto a fire - boom, boom, I was hit, for a while I was prepared to go with the flow, hoping the story would unfold/explain itself eventually, but sorry, hit the weird chick on the boat, the big monster in the water and the invisible something with claws and calling this book officially dnf and I don't care.

Easy read, light, great characters and a fresh approach to what is becoming an oversaturated market of sameness

This was a Goodreads recommendation - I like a rollicking, well written adventure as much as the next person but this wasn't it. Too many information dumps. I wanted to like the two main characters but 25% into the book still didn't know them and thought their relationship lacked any dynamic. I have better things to do.