Angel's Pawn (Guild Hunter, Companion Novella)
Nalini Singh is evil, evil, evil.
First, she writes a new series with a fresh spin on the whole angel thing that immediately sucks you into her world—there’s no warm and fuzzy touched by an angel huggy stuff here. In Angels’ Pawn, angels run different districts where they offer immortality in the form of vampirism in exchange for a century of service. Vampires that violate the conditions of their contract are hunted down by guild members like Ashwani, the heroine of the novel.
Ashwani has a love-hate relationship with Janvier, a 200-year old vampire she occasionally has to hunt only to find, mid-hunt, that he’s made up with whichever vampire he’s pissed off. Ashwani approaches Janvier for assistance as she investigates and eventually conducts a rescue for a kidnapped vampire. The action is tightly written and fits well within the bounds of the novella. Click here to read an excerpt.
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MOO cards (see Flickr for more)
I totally forgot to announce this before I left for ARRC, but we had some MOO cards made to give away to people we met. Wandergurl was very good at handing hers out, whereas I kept forgetting. So anyway, here they are in case you missed out. (If you want one, let me know!)
ARRC Round-up
More ARRC round-ups are appearing on the blogs, and I’ve collated links that I know of:
Gnomeangel — Adventures with a bleeding heart
Reading Adventures — Reminiscing about ARRC09 – Saturday
Tez Says — Tez in the City, Part II
Bronwyn Parry — ARRC09
Desirabelles — The Australian Romance readers conference 2009
Erica Hayes — tha kikass convenshun, we haz it
Paula Roe — Aussie Romance Readers Convention ‘09
Publishers Weekly — This, that and the Other Thing Monday
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Photo by circulating (via Flickr)
Every fortnight we’ll be posting a collection of news items, events, and other interesting tidbits related to books, and especially the Australian book industry. This first issue is bursting at the seams because it includes stuff from last year that I’ve been meaning to post. After this issue, we’ll be aiming to post current news and events as we hear about them. Click here for a list of Book Bizzo posts.
Book launches, events, and authors
Tempt the Devil by Anna Campbell was released last week, and there’s an interview of Campbell at Down Under Desirabelles. I WANT this book!
Bronwyn Parry’s second book–I assume it’s the loosely connected sequel to As Darkness Falls–will be out in September. A mass market paperback version of As Darkness Falls will be available in April.
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Stroke of Enticement by Nalini Singh (Psy/Changeling Series) in The Magical Christmas Cat
Is it sad that I’m posting on Christmas Day? (Um, that was a rhetorical question). Since many of us are celebrating Christmas, I thought it only fitting to talk about a Christmas-themed book.
Stroke of Enticement is the first story in the anthology The Magical Christmas Cat, and it’s the second novella set in Nalini Singh’s Psy/Changeling series. I loved the previous novella, Beat of Temptation, so I had very high expectations for this one. While enjoyable, Stroke of Enticement didn’t quite reach the sames heights for me.
In Stroke of Enticement, we meet two new characters, Annie and Zach. A near-fatal childhood accident has had a lifelong impact on Annie, the most significant of which is her mother’s insistence on treating Annie as fragile. A leopard changeling with soldier rank isn’t exactly on her mother’s list of acceptable boyfriends for Annie. At the same time, Annie has difficulty imagining that she can have the kind of love she dreams of–an enduring love that won’t fizzle out and turn into a trap as her parents’ marriage has become.
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Hostage to Pleasure by Nalini Singh (Psy/Changeling Series, Book 5)
Once I get past, say, the third book in a series, I tend to approach subsequent books with trepidation. Because there’s always the fear that maybe this will be the beginning of the end, the one that signals that the series is about to jump the shark. Thankfully, Hostage to Pleasure, the fifth book in Nalini Singh’s Psy/Changeling series, doesn’t disappoint.
Warning: Contains spoilers from previous books
Ashaya and Dorian: then and now
Ashaya Aleine is a genetic scientist coerced by the Psy Council to lead a top-secret project to create an implant that will turn the Psy population into a hive mind. Her story started in the previous book, Mine to Possess, although you don’t need to have known any of her backstory to start this book. Dorian Christensen is a sniper from the DarkRiver changeling pack, who, unlike the other changelings in his pack, can’t shift–he’s a leopard, but for some reason he can’t turn into his animal form. His sister was murdered by a serial killer whose psychosis was kept secret by the Psy Council.
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Caressed by Ice by Nalini Singh (Psy/Changeling Series, Book 3)
I’ve had this post in draft for ages, and I’ve decided to turn it into a quickie or it may never see the light of day. While Slave to Sensation is still my favourite book in this series, Caressed by Ice is a great read. The Psy hero/changeling heroine combination has a very different dynamic from the pairings in the previous books, and if you like your heroines to be dark, inscrutable and very alpha, you won’t be disappointed.
It took me a while to warm up to the characters in this book, and I had to read it twice to get a better understanding of what made them tick. Judd is a much colder hero, and while I can see how he’d appeal to other readers, I prefer the changeling heros of the previous books. I liked Brenna only after the second reading, because at times I found her irritatingly clingly (though she had good reason to be). I wasn’t certain how Singh was going to resolve the very huge problem of Judd’s need for the Silence protocol, and I found some of the explanations about how dissonance was affecting him confusing. But the book doesn’t take an easy way out, so I’m happy with the way it was resolved, although I would have liked to have understood Judd’s reprogramming of his brain better.
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Beat of Temptation by Nalini Singh (Psy/Changeling Series) in An Enchanted Season
Beat of Temptation is part of an anthology, An Enchanted Season, but I just had to post about it. I cried. I can’t remember the last time I cried while reading a romance novel or when I last read in the car, but I did both. It was that good.
Beat of Temptation is a stand alone novella set in the Psy-Changeling world, and while it isn’t essential to the series, it offers a glimpse into the changeling mating bond. There’s an external plot dealing with the relationship between Psy and changelings, but it’s peripheral to the story. Beat of Temptation is about Tamsyn and Nate (introduced in previous books in the series), who recognised the mating bond when Tamsyn was only fifteen and Nate much older (twenty-five?). Now, nineteen-year old Tamsyn wants to … well, get the party started, but Nate wants her to enjoy unmated singledom for a while because he’s scared she’ll end up like his mother, who married young and ended up committing suicide.
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Visions of Heat by Nalini Singh (Psy/Changeling Series, Book 2)
When I won an ARC of Visions of Heat by Nalini Singh, I went into squee mode because Singh’s first book, Slave to Sensation, blew me away. I don’t say that lightly. I devoured the book. And then I pimped it out to Wandergurl, who loved it so much she went and bought her own copy. And then I asked for my copy back so I could reread it. So winning the ARC of the sequel? Squee!
I was supposed to post this review a few weeks ago, but for various reasons didn’t get around to it. It’s probably just as well that I didn’t review the ARC as I meant to. Because the first time I read it? I wasn’t overly impressed. Don’t get me wrong–it’s a great read. But I’d reread Slave to Sensation first and the sequel just didn’t seem as compelling. I was bummed!
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