Baby, I'm Howling For You

December 18, 2017
Warren (Hard Breaker) phones it in for the opener to her shape-shifter Alphaville series, telling a story with a cardboard cutout villain and few surprises after the initial setup. Red wolf shape-shifter and librarian Renny Landry is on the run from nasty coyote shifter Geoffrey Hilliard and his gang. When Renny is injured on alpha wolf Mick Fischer’s property and he takes her in, both of them feel the unmistakable pull of being Goddess-given mates, but emotions surrounding the death of Mick’s previous mate make him reticent to open his heart, even after he makes his claim. Though the gender and dominance polarities make the intense feral sex unquestionably hot, Warren promotes the worst of gender stereotyping. She substitutes jealous possessive posturing and controlling protectiveness for male expressions of love, while giving Renny and her girlfriends all of the compassion along with strong interests in home decoration and talking about relationships. She also fails to develop the Washington refuge town and its residents. Even die-hard shifter fans will be disappointed. Agent: Ethan Ellenberg, Ethan Ellenberg Agency.

January 15, 2018
A wolf shifter running from a stalker finds herself in Alpha, Washington, where she meets the reclusive alpha wolf destined to be her mate.Renny Landry is on the run. A coyote shape-shifter and his violent pack of henchmen have been chasing her up and down the west coast, but she's finally made it to her destination: the town of Alpha, where shape-shifters of all kinds live and work together and look after each other. She can almost smell the town when she's mauled by one of her pursuers, but wolf shifter Mick Fischer gets her out of a bind with his shotgun and intimidating nature. As Renny heals, she and her new friends work to get her to a point where she can start over. This includes figuring out why Mick, the new wolf in her life, refuses to acknowledge her as his mate. As Renny's stalker gets increasingly desperate, vicious, and downright crazy, the shifters of Alpha work to ensure her safety as well as Mick's, since he has a history with the man in question. The quirky combination of small-town life and mild suspense makes for a relatively satisfying read, but the disjointed structure leaves swaths of story untold. Mick and Renny are a graphic novelist and a librarian, and they represent their work in their personalities; he's more of a shower, while she tends to tell. Additionally, Mick's "act first, ask questions later" mentality leads to some questionable interactions, and he and Renny never actually have any real, necessary follow-up conversation after significant things happen. This kind of communication issue leads to a few irreversible actions, and that puts a damper on the book. The most recent addition to Warren's (Hard Breaker, 2017, etc.) extensive collection of supernatural romances is entertaining but leaves the reader with some lingering questions.A run-of-the-mill mated-shifter suspense novel.

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