Review: Not up to the quality in story telling to the first book
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 4, 2014
I really liked the first book - so when I saw that second one offered for an introductory .99 cents, I jumped on the deal.I'm very glad I didn't pay more - because this book is a bit of a mess when it comes to what story it wants to tell.The beginning sets up several story arcs.We have the ten potential mates lured into the community under false pretense, as well as the 3 rescued from the OmRau..(Btw: What ever happened to those 2 immortality rings Toni acquired in  book one?  No one ever thought it might be a good idea to give those to the people going after the top-OmRau to level the playing field a bit?)There is the setup of Toni's half-siblings, Murk and Pandrea (?) and their conflict with their father's agenda.There is the detective that was still chasing after the mystery of the missing women because of Toni, botching the rescue of Kendra and ending up with a severely injured Dev in his clutches. We even get a hint that John, the detective, could very well be one of those sought after 'dragons,' further wetting our appetites for his story.I was expecting John to get drawn into the edges of the community, possibly turning into a go-between Toni and her half-siblings, as the top-OmRau ended up with John as their contact as they moved forward with their plan to recruit humans to help them fight the Varcolac.Instead we get some flashbacks to Dev's mom as a young girl in Romania and a time-skip of 5 months (I assume to avoid criticism of Marissa and Dev having no real foundation for their love - without actually having go through the work of showing them building their relationship into a meaningful connection).During those 5 months the detective - that was able to pounce on any of the other women reappearing almost instantly - never once went after Kimberly for information?Raymond and crew just sat twiddling their thumbs?That didn't help their credibility as the big scary enemy - even taking into account that there are only what? 18 of them - against a community of over 400 super powered Varcolac?If this book wasn't going to explore any of those story arcs in this book, imho it would have been better to just concentrate on Dev, Marissa, Alex, Luvera, Shon, and Petrella - and not to jump to John, Murk, or Pandrea's PoV until the end to set a hook for the next book (assuming that they will feature prominently in it).