Review: Excellent Fun!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 12, 2013
A friend recommended this book to me and based on the description and other reviews I figured I'd try it out. Andrea Speed was a new author, to me, and I was fairly impressed with her writing style and more than fairly impressed with her world building. This world she created is very fascinating and takes the shifter story/lore to a whole new and very different level.Roan is the ex-cop, private detective who takes smart-ass to a whole new dimension. I really liked him. He's cranky, grumpy and a curmudgeon but he cares about people and saving them. Of course you'd have to kill him before he'd ever admit that! He's a virus child, meaning he was born with the werecat virus entwined within his own DNA. He has no family and grew up in state or foster homes. He's a genius at investigating and if he hadn't "beaten" an abuser he'd probably still be a cop. He's better at being a private detective though.....he doesn't need to keep his snarkiness inside and that makes for way more fun reading.Paris is the ultimate man whore....his own description, I might add. He was infected by the virus while in college and he got the worst strain: tiger. The tiger strain takes so much physically out of the body that these cats don't usually live past thirty-five. So, Paris knows he's going to die. He works as Roan's "guy Friday" in the office and does what he can to help investigations. Paris' strength is his consummate acting/lying/manipulating skills that enables him (and, Roan, too) to get information out of people that might otherwise be difficult. I also really liked him.The cases and the mystery/detecting part of the writing, which is pretty much 95% of it, is really fantastic. Kept me on the edge of my seat trying to figure out the answers. I really, really would have liked more romance and interaction between Roan and Paris but their love for each other is obvious. I am going to continue to read more and hope that the writing stays as crisp and clean as this first book, which is actually two novellas sold as one book.