This book was torture for me. I wanted it to end so much!!

My problem was the writing because the story was decent enough. So many unnecessary dialogues and so little descriptions. But the most frustrating thing was this: (took these literally from the book, didn't changed anything ( )

For some reason, I put of reading this book and I now hate myself for it. It was at medium length and one of the best shifter stories I've read in a long time. Very balanced, just the right amount of sex and a bountiful of feelings. Very-hot rating.

I was impressed by this author using werepanthers because that's not something we see very often. It's almost always vampires/werewolves. Panthers are VERY sexy. Will look for more. ( )

B.A. Tortuga always comes through for me. Dusty, Nate and the other characters were wonderfully developed. The bombings put some suspense and mystery in a beautiful story that highlights the U.S. southwest. There was a depth to the story that kept me turning pages. I loved that both Nate's and Dusty's families knew that the guys were gay. Nate's mother was a hoot. The cover picture is awesome. ( )

Yay libraries!

This was published in 2009. It is surprisingly good for that much earlier in this author's career. If you've ever read her work, you'll recognize the archetypes she most frequently uses. I happen to like or not mind them. YMMV of course.

What impressed me about this story is that every plot escalation comes from the MC's trauma or the worldbuilding, or both. That's excellent. This is why I'll check out the next book.

Where it fails is threefold. The first is where many books with trauma fail, the repetition of denial/refusal supposedly because the MC hasn't worked through his trauma yet, but it could have been handled more gracefully at least half the times, or eliminated. The second is in repeated dialogue as if these people can't remember their last argument. That's an editing problem; writing is a lot slower than reading is, so it's easier to forget what you've done, or conflate different parts of your manuscript. But an editor ought to have caught it. And third, that last chapter cries out for a better edit of its clunky repetitious prose that at that point I read for the gist.

But I enjoyed it, and that's the point. Three solid stars for worldbuilding, the other two for the plot and pair despite the flaws. ( )

An excellent example of why gay-for-you books are so unrealistic. I just couldn't buy Jin's mate's* sudden acceptance of his new sexuality, nor his instant knowledge of how it all worked between two guys. Let's not get into just how he's able to do some of the things he does which he supposedly he's never done before! Even Jin, the werepanther, asks how he knows and the guy's response was quite silly. >shakes head
One of the biggest problems I had with this book other than the above, was the way Jin just seemed so serene about everything, whether good or bad. He was just a little too forgiving of the way others treat him (except with his father).

Others have given excellent reviews about why this book does not work, namely the really bad world building, the lack of explanations for the rules, characters in leadership positions not knowing the rules in the first place and etc., etc. (which strikes me as just a little too convenient for the plot of the story, in which Jin is the only character who knows the laws of their kind inside out, upside down and backwards). It would have been nice to have a pronunciation guide for the words "reah", "yareah", etc.
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*I never bothered to learn his name

I wanted to enjoy this book, but it turned into a book about how many times the Jin and his semel could get it on and there's no story in that sort of thing. I'll pass on the other two books in the series. ( )