Badger to the Bone

February 1, 2020
The final segment of the Honey Badger Chronicles pairs middle sister Max MacKilligan with an oblivious jaguar shifter who attempts to save her and winds up finding himself. When an attempted kidnapping of honey badger shifter Max goes south, ZeZé Vargas, one of the kidnappers who's a shifter though he doesn't know it, tries to protect her and is injured. After Max takes ZeZé home to New York and he heals, she's prepared to turn him loose, but her older sister, Charlie, demands she take some responsibility and help Zé navigate his new reality. "You brought him here, Max. You told him the truth. Now you need to deal with the repercussions of those actions." Zé soon learns how unique the MacKilligan half sisters are. Fiercely loyal and superlethal when they choose to be, they mostly want to be left in peace. However, thanks to their idiot father and Max's criminal mother, who's recently escaped from prison, everyone wants something from them--information, money, or skills, for instance--pitting them against mercenaries, hostile family members, and even law enforcement. In the midst of the chaos, Zé begins to make sense of the sisters' odd relationships with each other and the vast, unexpected network of friends and allies around them, and for the first time, he feels at home in his own skin and right where he's supposed to be, with Max by his side. Laurenston ends the MacKilligan sisters trilogy with a flourish, blending humor, action, and romance in her own inimitable and fabulous fashion, and she reminds us that family can be blood or choice and that different races (Max is half Chinese; Charlie is African American; Zé is Latino) and species can get along when they decide to, aided at times by baked goods. A sprawling cast of shifters combined with an intricate, complex plot can occasionally be confusing, but everything comes together in the end, and the characters, worldbuilding, and storytelling are vivid, inventive, and completely entertaining. A wild, brilliant ride.

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February 17, 2020
Laurenston (In a Badger Way) delivers all the dark, hilarious lunacy her fans expect in this third Honey Badger Chronicles paranormal romance, which delves into the life of the middle MacKilligan sister. Max MacKilligan, a full-blooded honey badger shifter, has a well-earned reputation for smiling sociopathy, so it’s no surprise that very few of the ex-military criminals hired to kidnap her make it out of their encounter alive. In fact, the lone survivor is Zé Vargas, who Max spares because she can sense that he is a jaguar shifter, though he doesn’t know that yet. Zé, who infiltrated the kidnappers hoping to take their organization down from the inside, is a model of sanity and integrity and he’s completely out of place in the all-shifter neighborhood of New York City into which Max drags him. Max’s fierce devotion to her sisters and loyalty to her friends quickly win Zé over as he attempts to navigate both his newfound powers and the shifter world while keeping Max safe from the myriad enemies who want her dead. Filled with familiar faces and more than a few kooky, delightful surprises, the plot neatly ties up loose ends while dangling tantalizing promises of things to come. Series readers will gobble this up. Agent: Ethan Ellenberg, Ethan Ellenberg Literary.

March 1, 2020

Zé Vargas was undercover with a group of kidnappers; the last thing he expected was for their target to come to them. But that was before he met Max MacKilligan. Now he's caught up in a world he never knew existed. Max insists that she's actually a shapeshifter--a honey badger shapeshifter--and that he can shift into some kind of jungle cat. She's definitely crazy. Except that she's right. Now Zé is trying to figure out who--and what--he really is, all while helping protect Max from the people who are trying to kill her. It would be nice if there weren't so many of them. Lucky for him, and Max, honey badgers are hard to kill. VERDICT Although the writing is uneven and new series readers may find it hard to keep track of all the characters, the dialog is funny and the story is enjoyable once readers let themselves go along for the ride. This book will appeal to fans of Laurenston's (Hot and Badgered) earlier work. Purchase where the author or other shifter romances are popular.--Sarah Loch, Springdale P.L., AR

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2020
Laurenston's furiously funny and action-packed shifter romance, following In a Badger Way (2019), offers up more shifter mayhem than ever before. Max Kill It Again MacKilligan is used to her accomplishments being overlooked by her half-sisters, Charlie and Stevie, who share the same scoundrel of a honey-badger father. Though she excels at stealing, manipulating, playing basketball, and ruthlessly killing her enemies, Max prefers her solitude, but then a solo operation goes sideways and she ends up bringing home a stray. Zez� Vargas was undercover until a stunning Asian woman with purple hair suddenly outs him as a cat! A firefight ensues and he is badly hurt, but when he wakes up on top of a china cabinet in the MacKilligan's house, Z� must contend with the facts: He is a shifter and the only person who can teach him how to use his powers, and who can stand his annoying felineness, is Max. Intersecting plot lines compete with the love story, but Laurenston's latest Honey Badger Chronicles novel is gold for readers who enjoy diverse paranormal romance with snark.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)