The Hidden Legacy series by Ilona Andrews is a huge hit with the Bitchery (especially Amanda) and though the series is somewhat over for now, that gives new readers a perfect excuse to binge all three books. Reader Aidee Campa has given us a great guest review of books one and two if the series to give you a nudge in the right reading direction!

Aidee recently graduated from college, where she was an English major and a political science minor. She started reading romance in high school, but isn’t quite sure which was her first romance read—Jean M. Auel, Fern Michaels, or something that she has completely forgotten by now. She loves reading, writing, chocolate, and listening to music, although not necessarily in that order. The most recent books she’s enjoyed have been Alisha Rai’s Hate to Want You, Alyssa Cole’s Extraordinary Union, Ilona Andrews’ Wildfire, and Leigh Bardugo’s Crooked Kingdom (there are more, but that’s probably a good place to stop).

…

I don’t clearly remember what made me pick up Burn for Me, but I do remember that I listened to it as an audiobook before I read it. I recommend listening to it, even if you’ve already read it, because Renee Raudman, the narrator, is really good. And before going any further, I would like it to be clear, I love this book. I have read it multiple times, and so far, I haven’t gotten tired of it. I will try my best to balance my love for this book with some critical analysis, but I can’t make any promises.

Here’s the cover copy for Burn for Me from Amazon:

Nevada Baylor is faced with the most challenging case of her detective career—a suicide mission to bring in a suspect in a volatile situation. Nevada isn’t sure she has the chops. Her quarry is a prime, the highest rank of magic user, who can set anyone and anything on fire.

Then she’s kidnapped by Connor “Mad” Rogan—a darkly tempting billionaire with equally devastating powers. Torn between wanting to run and wanting to surrender to their overwhelming attraction, Nevada must join forces with Rogan to stay alive.

Rogan’s after the same target, so he needs Nevada. But she’s getting under his skin, making him care about someone other than himself for a change. And, as Rogan has learned, love can be as perilous as death, especially in the magic world.

I think Andrews does a wonderful job of working with a trope that to some may seem to have run its course—the PI in the magical world. I feel this is because Nevada isn’t like most PIs I’ve read before. She already comes with a family—one that she is not looking to distance herself from—and she is likeable but still has flaws that can lead to bad consequences. The world is vividly drawn, and Andrews generally manages to walk that fine line of explaining enough without overwhelming the reader with information. The plot moves in a logical way, and yet that logic wasn’t immediately obvious to me until I had read Burn for Me a few times—which could be because usually, when I read for pleasure, I don’t pay close attention to this sort of thing, unless it’s very annoying and incredibly obvious.

In any case, the two points that may count against this book with some readers are that it is told in first person from Nevada’s point of view, and, because of that, Rogan is a little more opaque.

Nevada and Nevada’s family are all likeable. Or at least, the family we meet in this book—this is only the first book in what is looking to be a trilogy, or possibly a quartet. Nevada is good at her job, and that is amazing to watch in action. A lot of the time, we might be told a character is good at their job, but that is never shown on the page. The first two chapters are of Nevada doing her job as a PI in a world with magic.

Nevada has a strong sense of herself and her code and how it applies to her job:

Some easy job this turned out to be. At least I didn’t have to go to the hospital. I grimaced. The welt decided it didn’t like me grimacing. Ow.

The Baylor Investigative Agency started as a family business. … We had only three rules. Rule #1: we stayed bought. Once a client hired us, we were loyal to the client. Rule #2: we didn’t break the law. It was a good rule. It kept us out of jail and safe from litigation. And Rule #3, the most important one of all: at the end of the day we still had to be able to look our reflections in the eye. I filed today under Rule #3 day. Maybe I was crazy and John Rutger would’ve taken his wife home and begged her forgiveness on bended knee. But at the end of the day, I had no regrets, and I didn’t have to worry about whether I did the right thing and whether Liz’s two children would ever see their mother again.

And here’s something a bit further down which illustrates how she thinks of her family. The affection and tension is evident here, especially if one considers that Nevada is a grown woman still living with her family:

If Mom saw me, I wouldn’t get away without a thorough medical exam. All I wanted to do was take a shower and eat some food. This time of the day she was usually with Grandma, helping her work. If I was really quiet, I could just sneak into my room. I padded down the hallway. Think sneaky thoughts… Be invisible… Hopefully, nothing attention-attracting was going on.

We are also introduced to her family at the beginning of the book, and the interactions between Nevada, her sisters, her cousin, her mother and grandmother are great. Here is another snippet, where we meet most of Nevada’s family, and which introduces them nicely:

“Let me go!” Arabella snarled.

“Think about what you’re doing,” Bern said, his deep voice patient. “We agreed—no violence.”

“What is it this time?” I asked.

Catalina stabbed her finger in Arabella’s direction. “She never put the cap on my liquid foundation. Now it’s dried out!”

Figured. They never fought about anything important. They never stole from each other, they never tried to sabotage each other’s relationships, and if anyone dared to look at one of them the wrong way, the other one would be the first to charge to her sister’s defense. But if one of them took the other’s hairbrush and didn’t clean it, it was World War III.

“That’s not true…” Arabella froze. “Neva, what happened to your face?”

Everything stopped. Then everyone said something at once, really loud.

“Shush! Calm down; it’s cosmetic. I just need a shower. Also, stop fighting. If you don’t, Mom will come here and I don’t want her to—”

“To what?” Mom walked through the door, limping a little. Her leg was bothering her again. Of average height, she used to be lean and muscular, but the injury had grounded her. She was softer now, with a rounder face. She had dark eyes like me, but her hair was chestnut brown.

Grandma Frida followed, about my height, thin, with a halo of platinum curls stained with machine grease. The familiar, comforting smell of engine oil, rubber, and gunpowder spread through the room.

Their interactions continue in this manner throughout the book, even when the family members get upset with each other for logical reasons.

Here’s a slightly spoiler-y snippet of Nevada and her mom arguing:

“Okay, so you were right. It is a little bit about Dad, and it is a lot about keeping a roof over our head. This is our home. I will do almost anything to keep it. Also I negotiated with MII, and if I die, you get the name of the agency back for one dollar.”

Her face twisted. “I don’t care, Nevada. Sweetheart, I don’t care. I want you to be okay. None of it is worth losing you. I thought we were a team.”

“We are.”

“But you didn’t tell me. And you got Bern to cover it up.”

…

“I didn’t tell you because you would do exactly what you did last night. You’d order me not to do it. We are a team, but you’re my mother. You will do everything to keep me safe, and there is a point where it’s my decision to stay safe or not.”

My mother considered it. “Okay. Point made.”

We only get to know Rogan through Nevada for the majority of the book. Because the book is told from her point of view, it is possible for us to have an inaccurate impression of Rogan. This impression is not fixed by the end of the book, so I learned to be careful of Nevada’s observations. She’s good, but she isn’t infallible—which I like, but which some readers may find annoying.

That’s actually one of her flaws: she is good at observing people and coming to fairly solid conclusions, but occasionally, her own biases and assumptions get in the way of her conclusions, and sometimes she doesn’t have all the information.

To sum it up, you should all go read this book and stop reading this review, because I cannot clearly communicate how great this book is. The world building is intriguing, the characters are well-done, the plot is tightly woven. In case you hadn’t guessed it by now, I anxiously awaited Wildfire. I give this book an A-.

More exploration of Rogan would have been nice, but I don’t know that it could have fit into this book so well.

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The adventures of Nevada and Rogan continue in the sequel to Burn for Me. I also listened to this book before I read it, because I preordered it on Audible—I was that sure I would like it. However, there is an excerpt of Wildfire at the end of White Hot in the eBook and probably print versions, so if that kind of thing is important to you, make your choice accordingly.

As I expected, I also really liked this book. All the characters grow, even secondary ones like Leon, Nevada’s youngest cousin. Nevada and Rogan move firmly into the serious-romantic-involvement realm, although it isn’t exactly clear where their relationship will go by the end of the book, due to certain choices Nevada must make. Andrews’ plotting skill is on display in this book, too, so that while some threads clearly lead somewhere, it is harder to pick out where other possible threads might lead.

This book opens with Nevada using her awesome magical skills, while still trying to preserve her incognito status. She uses a disguise which involves a cloak/cape, among other things. Then she takes on a client with a very dangerous case. However, this time, she doesn’t make the same mistakes she made in Burn for Me, which was cool to see, because books wherein characters insist on repeating the same kinds of mistakes that got them into trouble before confuse me and will frustrate me to the point of not being interested in the book anymore.

The action related to the overarching conflict begins earlier in this book than in Burn for Me—Rogan is using quarters as projectiles by chapter 2—and so does the flirting between Nevada and Rogan. This is not to say that Nevada and Rogan do not argue at all during the book. They do, in a spectacular manner, but they are also working together on a case, and they are both capable of professional behavior most of the time.

We see the sisters, cousins and grandmother take a more active role in defending the family from attack and in helping out Nevada. That was also pretty cool, because it rounds them out in a way—we knew that her grandmother was a mechanic for the army, but actually seeing her drive a tank was awesome. In that same sequence of scenes, we get Leon using his magic for the first time, which results in the following commentary:

“I live in the gym. My biceps have teeth and my teeth have biceps.”

And any suspicions you may have had about Nevada’s family being more than they appeared on the surface are also confirmed by the end of the book in a variety of ways.

The case that Rogan and Nevada are working on in this book is tied to the case in Burn for Me, but it is not a replica. Andrews also managed to stretch out the overarching conflict in a way that did not feel unreasonable. This is also hard to do, because there comes a point when you—or maybe it’s just me—wonder, why can’t we know who the bad guys are?

There is a fairly clear transition from how Nevada perceived Rogan in Burn for Me to how she sees him by the end of the book. In Burn for Me, she came to the conclusion that Rogan didn’t see people as people, but by the middle of the book, she is convinced otherwise, and by extension, the reader can also be convinced otherwise. This makes their growing romance more believable. Yes, Rogan is attractive, but for a romance, attraction can’t be the beginning and end of it. The heroine and the reader should see in the hero something beyond attraction.

Nevada thinks of Rogan as a dragon, and while her initial conclusions about him are partially correct, he is also a caring dragon with a sense of humor. This transition is believable because Andrews shows us the transition on the page—we get to see Nevada witness Rogan’s reaction to losing people who were important to him. If Nevada just told us that Rogan wasn’t a sociopath, I would be hard-pressed to believe it, because Rogan isn’t a nice guy, especially when seen from a distance.

More of the world is explained, but we still don’t know everything there is to know about it, and like I said above, we still don’t know who the bad individual pulling the strings is.

But we do have covert team of stealth ferrets and a Chinese ferret-badger, so I guess that makes up for not knowing who the big baddies are—a little.

I give this book an A-, too. I would have liked for the conflict between Rogan and his family to have been resolved in this book, and I’m hoping it will be tied up in the third book. It also would have been nice for Rogan to tell Nevada his story, but at least Nevada didn’t make a wholly uninformed decision.

Go read this book, please. Or listen to it, whichever will make you the happiest.