Review: Rapetastic errorfest
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 05 26, 2013
After readingAn Unwanted Hunger (V'Kar)andAll in Time, I swore to myself that I would avoid Ciana Stone's books.  For some reason, I thought the name of this book's author was "Chula Stone" (that is even how it appears on my Kindle).  While this is very different in tone that the previous two books I've read by the author, I wouldn't say it is better.  In fact, in very significant ways, it is much, much worse.Lyra Seville is a young woman who just got her Master's Degree in Parapsychology (from Duke University, and I'm sure they'd be thrilled to know they were dragged into this whole mess).  Lyra is an adult and she is supposed to be of reasonable intelligence, but she still can't figure out how to get the money left to her by her parents from her aunt/adoptive mother (her aunt adopted her after her parents died).  Despite the fact that their relationship is clearly explained at the beginning of the book, Lexi will be referred to as Lyra's "stepmother" for most of her subsequent appearences.Lyra is a beautiful dark-haired/blonde woman (Stone can't make up her mind) who has just never found love.  Somehow she got all the way through high school, college, and graduate school without ever feeling the urge, so she's a virgin.  Her friend encourages her to go out and see a handsome magician at a local nightspot and BAM -- she falls in instant lust.Meanwhile, there is a crazy kill-rape cult kidnapping women and killing them.  Pages and pages and pages pass and it becomes clear that Nick, her handsome magician beau, may not be what he seems and Lyra is the target of the kill-rape cult.  Her virginity is of prime importance to them, leading to a bizarre scene where she is finger-violated in the woods and the doctor checking her out helpfully lets us know that she is still intact.  Plus, he adds, "I'd bet my stethoscope" that the kind of lube used on the assailant's glove was the same used at the hospital . . . based on the SMELL.  How exactly did that examination go again?  And why is that even an important detail (trust me, the case isn't cracked based on lube brand).Nick's old friend Detective Michael Santera gets involved and suddenly our virginal heroine has another love interest.  Also, Lyra inherits a house from a dead magician, so they move into that to hide from the bad guys.  The story goes on and on and on and on.  Lots of women get raped and killed, Lyra visits a farm, an old diary provides classically clunky exposition, there is a flashback to a murder onboard a ship that doesn't really fit at all, an evil count shows up, and Lyra has to use every brain cell in her brunette/blonde head to survive.The book is easily 100-200 pages too long for the weight of the story that it has to tell.  Lyra and her friend spent a couple of weeks hiding and the story just drags.  The story is driven by the discovery of the diary and spirit guides, truly lazy storytelling.  The main bad guy, "the Adversary," is given an entire clunky backstory that barely stands up.  Once you finish the book and realize who is actually good and who is actually evil, virtually every character has done things that make zero sense.  The characters act as if their presumed motivation is their real one, but once their real allegances are known, so much of what they have done no longer makes sense.  There is an overreliance on viceral responses to provoke engagement from the reader, but there are only so many times you can read about a dead woman, never in the story, being found with stuff cut off of her, before you don't care at all.To top it all off, the editing is w-r-e-t-c-h-e-d.  The books I have previously read by Stone didn't have this issue.  It seems as if it wasn't proofed at all and there are multiple places with some sort of formatting issue that causes a single name to be repeated for a line or more.Bottom line:  this book is too long, the plot is terrible, and there is no attention to detail.  Even if you get it for free, your time is worth something, right?