Rhiannon Held

Once again, I have given an extra preference towards books participating in the annual spfbo contest, and while the book didn't reach the finals, it did get a nice review that piqued my curiosity.

The story seems to delve into the POVs of two characters: Eric Davis, a 30 something former jobless magician who was sort of coerced into a too-good-to-be-true part-time assistant job to a very rich businesswoman named Ariadne, and Key, a 25 year old woman who became implanted with a sort of magical entity that reincarnates into humans endlessly at a very young age and has been imprisoned by Ariadne her whole life.

Eric doesn't know much about what Ariadne (who shares a long history with him as an ex college girlfriend of sorts) is up to, or why she is so busy with a mysterious genomics project, until he has a perfectly harmless business meeting with a secretary in a diner and she dies right in front of his eyes for no seemingly logical reason.

Freaked out of his wits, he then recalls a haunting memory that a similar incident happened some time ago and the victim appeared on the news. Suspicious of Ariadne's motives, Eric makes a surprise visit to "The Compound", a place that belonged to Ariadne, but he had never been there before. He soon realizes the amount of security guards and sparseness of the small community of identical looking houses is in reality a prison for 3 of the 5 abilities of "The Hand", which was initially created a long time ago in order to locate a goddess who had gone missing. The ability (with its pros and cons) is inherited to a different unsuspecting human when the prior living vessel dies, potentially along with important past memories of the ability's prior human lives. Ariadne somehow managed to capture 3 of the currently reincarnated abilities from a very young age and they have a very limited knowledge of the outside world, and live heavily restricted lives.

Eric is somewhat appalled when he realizes the strange young woman named Key with nauseatingly odd painted red hair grudgingly allows one of the guards to bind her wrists with a zip tie and her pupils black out just like the woman at the diner who died. The guard states that Key isn't human, and views her more as an object (probably as a sort of defense mechanism to rid himself of the guilt of being a willing participating in keeping her imprisoned).

While Key is frustrated with her current situation (fueled by the lack of memories of her past lives, which she believes Ariadne did on purpose to control her... and a lack of sexual fulfillment), her brothers Hound and Map seem content, or in the very least, ambivalent towards their captivity.

Eric must now find a modicum of morality he still retains to find a way to convince the three prisoners to escape together before Ariadne finds out.

Now, I found the basic premise to be a whole lot of fun. Key's ability to open absolutely any kind of lock (her ability might even encompass safes) with ridiculous ease (not to mention create key copies at will) is quite interesting because of its usefulness if you ever wanted to try a life of crime or espionage, along with being ironic because the guards have taken advantage of Key's inherent weaknesses (such as restraining her with plastic zip ties which are immune to her ability). We don't really get to see Map's ability all that much, but Hound is supposed to be able to locate a given person by their prior tracks. If Hound is in a place filled with people, the ability goes haywire and the user ends up in a temporary trance state.

Now, I do think the book has overt flaws. I found Map's personality to be a bit wishy washy, not fully developed, and Key was waaay too horny at first. I was never really sure if Eric's street smarts were because he was morally ambiguous (as in he was willing to do Ariadne's dirty work but not to the point of killing innocent people), or more of a symptom of inherent problems with the book. I can sort of understand that Key's behavior was very infantilized because Ariadne severely hindered her life so much that restricted reading material, and harmless tv stations is the only window she ever got of the outside world. She has never left the compound before, and even ordinary things like being approached by a dog freaks her out. Painting her hair an apparently unappealing color just to irritate Ariadne was one of the few liberties Key had and her acting out is a result of her frustrating living arrangement. It was however hard for me at times to recall she is in her mid 20's and not 17.

I would have wanted to see Map's and Lantern's powers in action. Map can apparently mentally locate someone from afar when someone makes a sufficiently good drawing. I will presume Lantern can illuminate dark rooms as long as he can see. Breath's ability is quite terrifying.

I found a lot of the book to be confusing by clunky narration, it sometimes required two reads of a page to understand what was happening. Ariadne's true intentions were... a bit weird, considering she treated Key worse than her brothers. There is another thing about Ariadne's apparent youthfulness not causing Eric any suspicion that was left hanging once you discovered the truth. The story of the gods that created the 5 abilities was also kind of left to a minor importance. I did find the scene where Map behaves insanely differently with Eric after something really huge happens to him halfway into the novel to be hilarious. I will not spoil the fun though.

All in all, the book is a standalone (a rarity within the genre), but it still leaves some leeway for a potential sequel. Flawed as it was for the already mentioned reasons, I did find it to be fun to read.… (meer)

Great were wolf politics. This was a great sequel to [b:Silver|13037538|Silver (Silver, #1)|Rhiannon Held|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1335223725s/13037538.jpg|18201282]. If you like your shifter worlds truly filled out and real you'll love this series. Dare and Silver are a mated pair of alphas, both of them fully realized. This book didn't concentrate on their relationship except to show how devoted they are to each other and how they work well together as a team. There is also POV from Susan a human who is in a relationship with an alpha wolf. She was enjoyable and added to the story. The whole story basically involved werewolf politics and it was well don and it all made sense. If you like Patricia Briggs Mercy Thompson stories you should love this one too.… (meer)

Loved this werewolf book. It was very well written and pretty well plotted. Its strength though was in the werewolf world building and the development of the characters. There was a mystery of what had happened to Silver and how to catch the bad guy. There was a lot of in depth character building especially of the main character, Andrew Dare. No info dumping in this book. All the info was working seamlessly into the words and actions of the characters. There was a love story that developed throughout the story but it was a bit of a different one.

There are several really good reviews out there and I can't think right now so I'll just say I loved it and recommend it, and maybe you should browse some of the other reviews. :-)… (meer)