This book was not what I expected, and I didn’t really enjoy it. I have no issue with reading about fairies, or vampires, or other mythical beings but this book didn’t do it for me and I blame it all on the heroine (who narrates this tale). Well, I also didn’t care for the hero much either, which doesn’t leave a whole lot for reading enjoyment. Perhaps if the plot had been more interesting…but alas, that was lacking too.
MacKayla (Mac) Lane had been living a sheltered life, working as a bartender and taking a few college classes to keep her parents off her back. But when her older sister Aline is murdered in Ireland, and the police have no idea who did it, Mac takes it upon herself to trek over there to find the killer (as you do). Aline had left a mysterious message on Mac’s phone shortly before her death, leading Mac to believe something sinister was going on. Unfortunately, Mac is rather naive, along with shallow and obsessed with her looks so right away I felt this wasn’t going to go well. She loves pink, and with her blonde hair and ever-changing nail color, she’s more Barbie than anything else. I get that you can be feminine as all hell, and yet be able to kick ass…in this case, not so much.
She gets lost, she sees things she can’t explain, and stumbles into places she shouldn’t be. Then she meets Jerricho Barrons, a mysterious sensual man with a temper and an abusive streak. Yet we’re supposed to find him sexy, and judging from all the pics of hot shirtless guys on Goodreads reviews, many readers do. These are obviously the same folks who think Christian Grey is hot. I wasn’t impressed. He tries to scare her off, he physically abuses her, grabs her hair and pushes her around and makes it clear he is only using her for his own purposes. She ends up involved with him, even though she waffles between not believing him and hiding things from him to needing his protection. You see, Mac is some sort of magic seer who can see past the glamour the fae use to hide their true ugliness. The Unseelie fae are monsters in this book, feeding off women and basically raping them to death – lovely creatures. Mac has to be the one to save humanity, basically, which didn’t seem plausible to me.
In short, this wasn’t the book for me and I won’t be continuing this series. Overall, I’m in a reading slump and just haven’t found much to capture my interest these days, thus the lack of reviews.
This is one of my first favorite UF series, but you definitely have to be willing to look past the alphahole behavior from Barrons and also stick around while Mac gets smarter. KMM isn’t very sophisticated in the way she writes her characters, but the way the series is plotted was fairly addictive for me.