I've read nearly every stoy in the Breeds series so I'm very familiar with what happens in the other Lora Leigh novels in this series. This was a good book. It's not as good as Mercury's War or Dawn's Awakening, which are my favorite breeds stories. The heroine like those two in the two books I mentioned is very smart and very feisty. She's no one's fool. She can fight physically and verbally. She's a mercenary for hire though she doesn't kill innocents. She's a far more interesting heroine than her sister, Rachel, the mated wife of Jonas. You learn a lot more about Diane, the heroine in this story, and her sister Rachel's background. There was hardly any info like that in Lion's Heat, which was Jonas and Rachel's story.
Yes, again Lora Leigh does the whole "I know you're my mate but I won't mate you" cliche to death. Can we put that dead horse to rest? It gets so old when novel after novel in this series has the same plot line where two highly attractive people know they're each other's Breed Mates, but refuse to succumb to the Mating Heat. But unlike Lion's Heat, the Mating Heat does happen far sooner in this story than it did for Jonas.
I thought Diane was a bit headstrong and should have given Lawe a break, but overall she was able to stand her ground to a very alpha feline breed like Lawe. The opening chapter is very emotional and disturbing. It starts off with a scene in one of the labs from the Genetics Council. It's brutal, but you need to read it to understand why Lawe is the way he is or really why any Breed who grew up in a lab is the way she/he is.
The sex scenes in this book are identical to what's in the previous books. I swear if you were to give me a Lora Leigh sex scene without telling me it was from her, I could guess it 99% of the time. The language, the descriptions, the positions..all the same. I was almost skimming those sections because I was having deja vu from the previous Breed stories.
The typos that plague so many of Lora Leigh's last books are evident in this book as well, though it's not missing an entire chapter as in Navarro's Promise. For example, on page 51 of the version I have, Rule and Lawe are said to be identical twins AND ON THE VERY SAME PAGE on the bottom, it's said they're fraternal twins. There's another page where something is written from the point of view of Leo, the first Feline Breed, but he was placed nowhere in the scene. Things like this show the editor for this book was asleep when doing his or her job.
Overall, not a bad Breeds book. Styx's Storm and Navarro's Promise were far worse than this. I've read better in the series and I've definitely read far worse in the series. The ending is flat. There's no satisfying conclusion to the plot.
