J.A. Belfield

I wanted to give this one 4*, I really did, but I wouldn’t have been true to myself and how long it took me to really want to continue reading without a little mental cheerleading if I had.

Yes, Tayla has enough demons in her closet to deal with, without the ones she encounters on a regular basis, but I just couldn’t quite bring myself to care about her problems.

What saved this book for me was E’s character because I found him more likable and believable than Tay. I even quite liked Shade (I smell one of the future stories being for him) and Wraith. I guess it’s lucky that I often look more for a connection with the males than the females in novels, because they’re what kept me reading. I liked the word Ione created. The setup, the UG hospital, the slayers (Guardians), and believe she has a decent basis for the future works in the series.

I must say, though, I understood very early on that Jagger was behind the body-part-marketing, and thought it a real shame that the author didn’t even attempt to shadow that a little better, that it was made really obvious pretty early on who was the bad guy. I also 100% expected Tay’s female boss to be there at the Zoo and a part of the scheme. I disliked her from the off, despite barely hearing a word from her throughout the novel, but then the fact the reader knows so little of her/meets with her so little should have been the very reason we don’t jump to the conclusion of her being one of the bad guys, because her minimal appearances should have meant she stayed much deeper into the back of the readers mind.

So … will I read on?

Well, I’m always up for giving an author more chance than the first in a series to impress me, so yeah.
Let’s just hope everything isn’t quite so blatantly mapped out in the successive books, though.