Review: Entertaining Novella With Abrupt End
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 23, 2012
I confess I love Thea Harrison's Elder Races series.  She's an excellent writer who has built a really compelling world involving shape-shifting wyr, dark and light fae, vampires, and all sorts of other creatures that inhabit an alternate world in the present day. This novella is not really the best example of her work and doesn't add much to the series overall, but is still entertaining.40 year old retired Special Forces soldier Claudia Hunter is driving along a deserted stretch of highway in Nevada when she sees a huge dog lying injured and dying by the side of the road.  Turns out it is 27 year old Luis Alvarez, who is actually a wyr on a mission to investigate a local mining company.  The story focuses on Luis' rescue by Claudia, recovery in the tiny mining town she takes him to, and what exactly happened to him.  The mystery isn't really much of a mystery.  The bad guys are identified right away and brought to justice.  Claudia is a fun character, different than the usual 25-34 year old heroine.  Luis has a lot of hunky alpha male appeal and his being much younger than Claudia is also fun and different.Harrison does a great job of creating the atmosphere of the tiny mining town, dusty roads, vast expanse of desert and corruption of some of the locals. Claudia and Luis are appealing characters and likeable as a couple. But the story ends pretty abruptly.  We readers get our HEA, sort of. Luis has found his mate for sure in Claudia but the age difference between them and the fact that Luis, being wyr, has a longer life span than the human Claudia means that they won't have a lot of time together in the grand scheme of things.  It's a bit of a downer at the end as a result.  Harrison uses a box of unique tarot cards to loosely tie this short story back to an earlier, better one (True Colors) and, at the end, the box is passed on to another so it looks like there will be more to come.  Overall, not my favorite of Harrison's novellas. 3.5 stars.