Blood, Violence, Graphic Deaths, Paranormal Scary Scenes

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to Michelle Heron, Imogene Nix, and Love Books Publishing for this free copy. All quotes in this review are taken from the Advanced Reader Copy and may change in final publication.

Thank you again so much to the ARC Review team with Michelle Heron for allowing me to read this trilogy from Imogene Nix. While I felt like the first novel was okay, I had a harder time getting involved with this one. Usually I don’t particularly pick series that have different characters focused in different novels – where it doesn’t really seem like the books relate to one another besides possible brief cameos in the future books – but this one had some promise.

In this novel, we focus on Javed (Xavier’s right hand security dude type figure?) and Celina, a new character to the story. When we first meet Celina, she seems to be having really bad migraines – I can relate, sis – and yet for some reason her migraines seem to be connected with some really insane technical issues around her. Now, whether this ends up being good for her or not, Celina gets taken by Javed and others from his new Nest because she is a danger to everyone around her. Basically, she is an unknown witch, and she doesn’t know she’s a witch, and since she doesn’t know how to control her powers, it’s been building up inside her to the point that she could cause a massive explosion. That’s not exactly her fault, since she had no idea what she was except for a human woman, but I didn’t completely blame her for not wanting to go easy with the people that seemingly took her away from her regular life.

Now, this book was a little interesting because it starts to introduce different kinds of supernatural creatures. Sure, their introduction to the book wasn’t super pleasant – I mean they are pretty vicious and hungry you know… – but I liked that we had more supernatural forces to look at besides vampires and witches. Of course, nothing is wrong with vampires and witches since I love both, but since those can be considered “typical supernatural creatures”, it’s always interesting to see how authors get creative with their world-building. Even if it takes place in the “real world”, I would consider this world building since it’s totally up to the author on what type of creatures to include in the universe. Like with the blood siren in the first novel – which can I just say that… for all of the hype on how important blood sirens were, the first novel barely delved into that lore… – Nix added some creativity to her paranormal romance series.

Unfortunately, I personally wasn’t a fan of Celina, which was a shame since I really wanted to enjoy a witch as a main character in a novel and was excited to see how Celina would develop from her time with the Nest. Unfortunately, I just don’t feel like she really developed like she needed to in this book, and it was just a disappointment for me when I wanted to see what she could become of herself by the end of this novel.

Other than that, I think it was okay. I’ll still be reading the final book in the trilogy so stay tuned for that.