C+
Genre: Paranormal, Romance
This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by PaulaK. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Paranormal Romance category.
The summary:
Fierce immortal warrior. Host to the demon of Disease. Torin’s every touch causes sickness and death—and a worldwide plague. Carnal pleasure is utterly forbidden, and though he has always overcome temptation with an iron will, his control is about to shatter.
She is Keeleycael. The Red Queen. When the powerful beauty with shocking vulnerabilities escapes from a centuries-long imprisonment, the desire that simmers between her and Torin is scorching. His touch could mean her end, but resisting her is the hardest battle he’s ever fought—and the only battle he fears he can’t win.
Here is PaulaK's review:
This is the 11th book in Gena Showalter’s Lords of the Underworld series but the first that I’ve read. I’d heard good reviews for her earlier books in this series so I was eager to read one and I’m sad to say that I was underwhelmed. Maybe I got my hopes too high but it didn’t knock me out of the park.
The reader is dropped into the middle of the plot. Torin, the hero, is trapped in a prison next to the heroine, Keeleycael – later called Keeley, then Keys, known as the Red Queen for the amount of bloodshed and violence in her past. Torin, the keeper of the demon Disease, makes anyone who touches him with bare skin sick and he is trying in vain to save the life of his friend Mari who had touched him skin to skin. Keeley had been imprisoned with Mari for years and had bonded with her so she swears vengeance against Torin for Mari’s death.
The dialogue during these early scenes creates precedence for the rest of the book and that was a huge part of my problem with it. Keeley talks about her rage but it’s pretty clear that she can’t/won’t follow through with it. Both characters initially take offense at anything said by the other, bluster about how much they are going to kill/maim/etc, then never follow through. I know – the heroine can’t actually pull the hero’s spine through his mouth and still have a Happily Ever After with him but it’s tedious to hear her talk about all the evisceration that’s going to happen when you know it’s not.
So Torin and Keeley each break out of the prison and plan to kill the other but end up working together to leave the realm. The first half of the book is them traveling through realms, lusting after each other, then snarking back and forth in strangely contemporary dialogue for someone who’s been imprisoned for a long period of time. Torin is desperate to find his friends who have gone missing and Keeley has the power and the knowledge of how to use certain artifacts that the Lords of the Underworld have to find anyone or anything in the world. He needs her to help find his friends and she agrees as long as he pays her in sexual encounters. That whole conversation was a little strange but you just have to kind of go with it, since it creates a situation where the hero and heroine stick together. They eventually make it to the human realm and back to Torin’s home/Lord of the Underworld fortress. There they meet up with everyone who has already had their own book or will have their own story in the future. There was so much testosterone from all the alpha males that I’m surprised the walls didn’t collapse from chest thumping reverberations.
Keeley finds Torin’s friends and they discover that Lucifer is the new bad guy trying to move the plot forward. Maybe this would make more sense if I had read the first 10 books of the series but it seems that most of the action happens just because. Keeley eventually settles in and becomes friends with Torin, while Torin shifts back and forth between wanting to make it work with Keeley then becoming overwhelmed with guilt and trying to call it off. This happens a few times and each time I cared a little less about Torin’s happiness and was rooting for Keeley to move on.
Eventually they each realize that their lust has turned to love but the cycle remains the same until Hades, Keeley’s former fiancé then betrayer, clues them into the fact that
How convenient. There was some talk about spirit and skin but the whole point was just to get them to be able to have sex without her almost dying. At some point, they each get kidnapped or captured and the other goes to save them.
Keeley’s timeline is hard to pin down.
Her modern language is explained away by frequently using a seer to look into the future but I don’t really buy that as an excuse to talk like a college aged teenager on Spring Break. Both Torin and Keeley were flippant in their internal and external communication which became really annoying after the first twenty pages of it.
They each flit between lust, hatred, rage, and grief at the drop of a hat. There is so much telling in this story and not enough showing. Even in the fight scenes that are supposed to show how badass Keeley is, they never live up to the hype. The reader gets snippets of Keeley’s background from her fever dreams when she gets sick (making out with Disease will do that to you) and other characters tell about their memories or rumors they heard but Keeley never acts like the badass she’s supposed to be. She is supposedly the most powerful creature anyone has ever seen since the beginning of time but brimstone scars can minimize her powers so everyone has them. This happens throughout the entire book. Then there is a cycle of lusting after each other, Keeley getting sick, Torin feeling guilty, then Keeley getting better and the lusting starts all over again. They never seemed to move past this cycle until the very end of the book and each time, it lost its emotional potency.
There is foreshadowing for a story about Cameo, the keeper of Misery, and Lazarus that I am looking forward to reading. And I realized why I enjoyed the short snippets about them more than the rest of the book about Torin and Keeley – Torin and Keeley’s inner dialogue had the exact same tone. They sounded so similar that they might as well have been the same person.
It wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t as good as I had hoped.
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My thought was that I hoped she’d shared her popcorn with the seer, since it seemed she spent the whole time watching movies. Wilson? Really? That was her take away.
Is that the opposite of Jizzdeath?
C+? You are very kind.