Review: Fast-paced adventure packed with romance!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 26, 2010
When an enslaved djinni teams up with a rule-breaking angel, the resulting tale is a fast-paced adventure packed with romance.Sara is an archivist working on a project that will allow manuscripts to be stored using light. She's also an angel. Sara's friend, Andrew, tells her about Tommy, an eight-year-old boy with a life-threatening bone infection. Sara takes it upon herself to research a possible cure, even if she has to break the rules to do it. Her quest leads her to the collection of a ruthless crime lord, Vince Ablett. Sara's already "borrowed" one of Vince's books and is positive that a second foray will be undetected and also let her find the information to save Tommy.Everything goes according to plan until Sara is caught by a sexy djinni. Filip, forced by a curse to grant three wishes to whomever possesses his bottle-prison, is currently bound to Vince. The mobster's first wish is for Filip to guard his estate and that duty includes bringing him any interlopers. Even though Filip is instantly attracted to Sara, he still must obey orders. Jaded by his centuries of servitude, Filip decides to use Sara to trick Vince into squandering his second wish. Knowing how covetous Vince is, Filip is sure that he'll want to add Sara to his acquisitions. Since she can call on the other angels for aid and thus escape, Filip is pretty sure that he's got a fool-proof plan.All of that changes when Vince receives a phone call from a madman. Vince's daughter, Jay, has been kidnapped, and unless Vince travels to Melbourne, her captor has promised to kill her. Vince immediately uses his second wish to have Filip rescue Jay. Instead of using the opportunity to escape, Sara decides to help Filip on his mission as she already has feelings for him.Angel Thief is a fairly short book. It really makes the most of the pages it has, though. Sara and Filip are both fully-realized characters with believable motivations. Sara is sweet and giving and thinks of herself as pretty selfless. Filip, on the other hand, has had to fight tooth and nail for any semblance of freedom over the years. As they rush to save the life of a young girl, the two of them discover things about themselves and each other. Sara and Filip are a cute couple and complement each other well, each playing to the other's personality in a way that was believable. I will also say that Ms. Schwartz definitely knows how to write a sex scene. In my opinion, they were done just right: long enough to satisfy my wish to see them together, but not so long that they dominated the story.The main problem that I had with the book was its length. Too much was trying to be accomplished in too little time. The romance between Sara and Filip was a bit rushed in some aspects - Sara is a virgin, and prim and proper, yet within hours of meeting Filip, she's throwing herself at him and the two are "in love". Really? It was a little hard to buy into. When Sara is caught, it is actually her second visit to the library of Ablett. I think that the story would have had a lot more depth had the author added a chapter and had the hero and heroine meet during Sara's first foray into rule-breaking. That would have given them both a little more time to think about each other and would have sold the relationship a bit better. I also would have liked to have seen Vince's character developed a little bit more. All in all, another thirty to fifty pages would have made for a more engaging tale.Angel Thief was a perfect book to lose myself in for an evening and I definitely enjoyed my visit. Spending time with Sara and Filip was a delight -- I wanted to stay in their world longer and can't wait to return in future books from the Out of the Bottle series.Reviewed by Arkalifor The Romance Reviews