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Book Review of Any Given Doomsday (Phoenix Chronicles, Bk 1)

Any Given Doomsday (Phoenix Chronicles, Bk 1)
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Elizabeth Phoenix used to work for the Milwaukee Police Department, and her psychic abilities were helpful in finding those who had committed the crimes and locking them up. Liz's partner was killed in the line of duty and she feels she is at fault, so she leaves the force. While Liz is at work one day she feels a tug telling her to go see her foster mother Ruthie, but when she arrives Ruthie is just taking her last breath. Liz ends up in the hospital in a coma, and when she wakes up the only thing she remembers are horrible creatures haunting her dreams.

The police think that the murderer is Jimmy Sanducci, Liz's former lover and another of Ruthie's foster kids, but Liz knows better. She knows that Jimmy isn't capable of murder. That is until she meets up with him and he introduces her to a world of supernatural creatures that are on the brink of war. He informs Liz that she is a Seer, and that she will be the one to receive the visions telling Jimmy where the bad guys are and how to kill them.

Honestly this book almost bored me to tears. It had the potential to be a really cool story, with Liz being a Seer and having the powers needed to help find the evil in the world before they wreak havoc on the human race. But there was just too much wrong with this book for me to really enjoy it, and mostly it just made me angry. The author uses sex as a tool to gain magic powers from the person who comes inside Liz, and it was like reading an Anita Blake book. The use of rape in the story not once but twice is just too much! How is a girl supposed to be mentally stable enough to fight evil if she is raped twice over the course of a few days? Even if she enjoyed the sex in the end it was still RAPE. It was against her will.

There is also the issue of character development, or lack thereof. The story starts out and not much is said about Liz and you don't even get a good view point of her personality, so she's kind of boring. She's supposed to be tough, but there is nothing that leads me to believe this.

I know that Lori Handeland has another series (Nightcreature Novel series), and I hope it's better than this as there are eight books in that one.

Overall, I'd say it could have been GREAT, but it failed to deliver.