An entertaining sex romp sprinkled with sword-and-sorcery pixie dust.
A woman beset by four gorgeous, magical princes enjoys them all in this rollicking fantasy romance.
Rylee Gray, a downtrodden Ashlander in the kingdom of Lumathyst, infiltrates the royal palace to snoop for information on her missing sister, Erin, by attending the Choosing, a masked ball at which a woman is selected to be the collective mate of the Legends of Chaos, the realm’s four princes. Rylee hates royalty and is dismayed when she herself is chosen, which contractually obligates her to have sex with the Legends; but her dismay ebbs when she beholds their handsome faces, splendid physiques, and beguiling powers. There’s nice-guy Kal, who can fly; earthy horndog Axl, who controls the sea; suave brainiac Pierce, who reads minds; and, most tantalizing of all, brooding bad-boy Jax, dubbed the Nightmare for his wolfish grin and ability to emotionally manipulate people into feeling terrified. To assess compatibility, Rylee spends a month at each Legend’s estate getting to know him personally and carnally, and, for good measure, she helps fight a rebel group called the Faders. But she worries that she will be executed if it’s discovered that she’s an Ashlander as well as a “demi” with the power to control wind; both conditions disqualify her from matehood. She also fends off Jax’s cruel father, King Baydel, who vacillates between trying to rape her and wanting to kill her. Rylee’s courage, compassion, and erotic adventurousness soon has the Legends—even prickly, sardonic Jax—eating out of her hands. She then faces a final hurdle to becoming their official mate: the Athanry, a ritual that will make her immortal—if she survives it. Presley’s sketchily developed fictive world is full of contrivances designed mainly to set up Rylee’s lavish, graphically detailed sex scenes, which include spanking, bondage, disembodied mental sex, group sex, and floating-up-in-the-sky sex. Fortunately, her punchy prose conveys it all with elegant characterizations—“She was a jagged diamond of indifference in a sea of attention-seeking wealth”—and horny verve. (“He’s so damn tall, with bronze skin over tons of muscle, and his energy is just as large. It’s a marvel there’s space enough for him in this room; it makes me wonder what else about him might be big.”) Rylee’s mix of public feistiness and bedroom submissiveness to her buff suitors will keep readers stimulated.
An entertaining sex romp sprinkled with sword-and-sorcery pixie dust.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781649377524
Page Count: -
Publisher: Entangled: Red Tower Books
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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