This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Catherine Heloise. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Best First Book, Paranormal Romance category.

Here is Catherine Heloise's review:

Mind Sweeper is a paranormal romance, nominated for a RITA® in the Best First Book category. I had difficulty scoring this novel, because while it really had a lot going for it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it on my first read-through, it also contained one or two elements that drove me nuts. Reading the novel a second time (and no longer under the slightly mind-melting influence of cold tablets), I found that while the story was much tighter and well-plotted than I had recognised on first reading, but the things that had bugged me the first time through actually managed to annoy me even more. I found it difficult to weigh the elements that really worked against the ones that made me want to throw things. I’ll try to start at the beginning and outline what worked before I go into my rant.

The novel opens well, with one of the best first lines I’ve seen in the paranormal genre:

An angel, a demon, and a vampire walked into a bar. No, seriously, they did. And all hell broke loose. Then I got called in…

It’s clever, it’s funny, and it immediately has the reader wanting to know what the protagonist’s job entails, and what sort of world she lives in. The good thing is, the writing is like this pretty much throughout. We spend our time in Kyle’s headspace, and she is sarcastic and funny and has a chip on her shoulder the size of a large boulder. All of this makes for an entertaining narrative voice. The worldbuilding is also excellent, and the secondary characters and their relationships really made this book for me.

The set-up is that Kyle, a human endowed with the power to wipe and replace memories, works for the Bureau of Supernatural Relations. This is an organisation whose job is one half keeping the human world from being aware that supernaturals exist, and the other half solving and mediating crimes involving ‘supes.’ Kyle’s team consists of herself, Jean Luc, a seductive French vampire, and Misha, a Shamat demon with an addiction to television shows and the ability to recite every episode of the Brady Bunch. Two other supes are attached to their team: Dolly, a shapeshifter and blonde bombshell with the heart of a barracuda, is their receptionist, tasked with keeping out those who don’t need to know about the Bureau; and Dr. Sabrina Miller, succubus and emergency physician, is both their medical examiner and their in-house doctor. Sabrina is my secret favourite character, though I’m not sure when she sleeps. Everyone in this team is ridiculously good-looking, incidentally. Evidently, supes have excellent genes.

But after the incident in the bar, Joe Dalton, a human cop who works in media relations, is asked to join the team and, well, shenanigans ensue. I’ll get to those in a bit. Suffice it to say, there is attraction, there is a matchmaking vampire, and apparently all the non-humans in the book can monitor the progress of this relationship by smell. Which, now I put it that way, is faintly disturbing.

One area where Jones excelled with this book was the plot and the pacing. (Pacing seems to be something that a lot of new authors have difficulty with, so bonus points for leaping that hurdle with style.) There were some good twists, and the story tends to suck you in so that you can’t put it down, which I think is largely due to Kyle’s voice and the relentless pace. It’s a good, solid paranormal detective story. Jones managed to throw in a few plot twists that I didn’t expect, which was also pleasing – I especially liked Dalton’s Deep Dark Secret, which turned out to be entirely different to my theories on the subject. I will probably read the sequel, because I want to know more about what is happening in this world. Also, I want to see the leader of the Pavel demons go down. I know he’s up to no good.

The thing that I suspect Jones did struggle with was genre, because this novel feels much more like a young adult urban fantasy novel (albeit with unusually spicy sex scenes) than a romance novel. The romance didn’t seem all that integral to the plot, and unfortunately, I think the story was weakened by a need to give the romance a happy ending, rather than the more ambiguous and interesting one that it had been leading to. For me, I’d have liked to see that last chapter as the start of a new book, rather than the end of this one. Or not to see it at all – it seemed to make things a bit too easy, in retrospect. I think, too, I’d have found it much easier to forgive Kyle for her lapses into Hostility-Fuelled Idiocy had she been a teen and not a supposedly adult woman in her twenties.

Which brings me to a couple of things that I found very, very annoying.

First, Kyle, despite being apparently quite knowledgeable and competent at her job, is, at times, also stubborn and hostile to the point of stupidity. This was a problem, because for all her intelligence in other respects, her need to vent every emotion regardless of the circumstances frequently brought her into Too Stupid to Live territory. And sometimes, this seemed to come from nowhere at all.

Alas, at other times she had good reasons for her hostility – which brings us to the hero, and, it must be said, the team.

Kyle’s family background was pretty awful – her father wasn’t there, her mother went through a string of boyfriends, and essentially, Kyle had to be the grown-up in the family from a young age. For her, Misha and Jean Luc have become family – indeed, she identifies more with supes than with humans – and her relationship with them is one of the things I enjoyed most about this book. It’s clear that Misha views Kyle very much as a younger sister, and Jean Luc at one point says that he views her as a daughter, and there is a certain level of patronisation that comes with that view.

I initially didn’t have a problem with any of that. After all, the two supes are significantly older than Kyle (Jean Luc at least is more than 300 years old); they are, by nature, stronger and better able to defend themselves against threats than Kyle is. It is clear that even the most well-intentioned of supes tend to view humans as the weaker species. Moreover, it must be said that Kyle’s tendency to fly off the handle at the drop of a hat made her feel like more of a teenager than the adult she is supposed to be.

But when Dalton joins the team, he comes in and more or less takes over. How this happens, I don’t quite know. Worse still, the boys bond with him instantly in a testosterone-fuelled way that seems to override any previous loyalty to Kyle – not that they aren’t all still super-protective of her, but they certainly give the impression of respecting Dalton a lot more than they respect Kyle, despite having worked with Kyle for years and Dalton for only a day.

Kyle wants Dalton off the team, and when it turns out that he doesn’t scare easily, she looks for other ways to send him packing. And so, when Dalton overhears a very couple-like conversation between Kyle and Misha, makes the assumption that they are an item, and is clearly disappointed by this, Kyle chooses not to correct him. Now, please note that Dalton says nothing out loud about this – Kyle deduces his assumption from his reaction to the conversation – and that Kyle does nothing on the page to actively encourage this belief on Dalton’s part. Note also that Kyle has known Dalton for maybe two days at this point.

So a day or two later, Dalton starts to kiss her, gets her all hot and bothered, and then is all, oh no, this isn’t fair on Misha, this isn’t fair on you, I can’t do this, I can’t talk to you, I must leave now, and Kyle spends the night trying to ring Misha and feeling terribly guilty. And then she confesses her deception, such as it was, to Misha in the morning, and he is forgiving, with a side order of ‘I told you so’. And then half an hour later, Kyle overhears Misha and Jean Luc talking about the fact that they had placed bets with Dalton on whether she would confess or not – and it turns out that Dalton knew that Kyle and Misha were not an item before he kissed her. He just wanted to teach her a lesson. And apparently, Misha and Jean Luc were following the “bros before hos” code on this one. Charming.

Meanwhile, my Kobo was taking a brisk arc across the room, fortunately shielded by its padded cover. On occasions like this, you need your Kobo to have a padded cover.

Now, Dalton does apologise. And Kyle does, eventually, accept his apology – though, to my ire, she seems to feel that his behaviour was justified. Aargh. And I can actually see why she is still willing to give Dalton a go. He’s smart, he’s attractive, he’s very good at his job, he’s accepting of Kyle’s ability without wanting to exploit it, and he does genuinely try to understand her. Also, while he might be considered overprotective in another book, he can get away with it here, because there is so much mortal danger going around here that overprotectiveness starts to look like a sensible precaution. Dalton seems to be making a bona fide effort to tone down the chauvinism, too. It would be helpful if everyone around him wasn’t enabling the chauvinism, but what can you do?

But alas, while I could see what Kyle saw in Dalton, it was harder to see what Dalton saw in Kyle. He does appreciate that she is a strong woman, and that she is good at her Mind Sweeping, and a kind person, and he seems to enjoy the hostility, but… I don’t know. Maybe if I were surrounded by chauvinistic and patronising (yet strangely attractive) males, I’d be hostile to the point of unreasonable stupidity, too.

(Which came first? The chicken or the egg? The patronisation or the unnecessarily stupid behaviour? It’s a positive feedback loop made 100% from people I would like to smack!)

So that’s my little rant.

I don’t want to end on a negative note, because Mind Sweeper really is a decent book. It’s a nice, easy read for a day when you just want a fun plot in a well-thought-out world and don’t want to think too much. For those who don’t like such things, I’d note that there is a fair bit of violence in this story, however, it mostly takes place off-screen. I’m a wuss about violence, and on the whole, it didn’t bother me here – in fact, weirdly, I found it a fairly cosy read, perhaps because of the family-style interactions within Kyle’s team. I do think Mind Sweeper suffers from genre confusion, and the romance itself was on the weak side, but it’s a good first effort. I’m giving Mind Sweeper a B, because while it didn’t rock my world, I did enjoy it, even if I had to rant at my husband about male chauvinists for half an hour after I finished reading it. And I’ll look forward to seeing what Jones does next.