Butch O'Neal is a fighter by nature. A hard living, ex-homicide cop, he's the only human ever to be allowed in the inner circle of the Black Dagger Brotherhood. And he wants to go even deeper into the vampire world to engage in the turf war with the lessers. He's got nothing to lose. His heart belongs to a female vampire, Marissa, an aristocratic beauty who's way out of his league. If he can't have her, then at least he can fight side by side with the Brothers...
When Butch sacrifices himself to save a civilian vampire from the slayers, he falls prey to the darkest force in the war. Left for dead but found by a miracle, the Brotherhood calls on Marissa to bring him back, though even her love may not be enough to save him.
Never let it said that I don't come late to the party! Weeks after everyone else has done their reviews I am finally ready to do mine! There are a couple of factors as to why I am so late. The first is that my book took a week more to get to me than it did to everyone else (or at least that is the way it felt!) and then it took me just under a week to actually pick it up. Then when I did pick it up, I did so on a night when I was really exhausted, and had gone to bed at 8.30pm. I thought that I might just read a couple of chapters...you know...just a few pages. At 1am I put the book down having read 400 pages, and then I finished it the next morning on the train!
Enough on the preliminaries! I will start by saying that I wasn't really a Butch fan before I read this book, and whilst he was fine in this book, there is no way that this book surpasses Lover Awakened for me. The highlights in this book for me were to see what is going to happen with Vishous, to see the development in John Mathew's story, and to see the continued development of Zsadist! So those were the highlights, but I did think Butch was okay. It was interesting considering the bond between Butch and V how they ended up being vital to each other in the bigger scheme of things.
For once, I do think that we saw some development in the female characters, prompted by Marisa. I was particularly glad to see this for her because otherwise her role would have been limited to shallow high society woman, and I love the idea of the women sticking together.
Butch and Marisa seemed to fall in love very hard and very fast, but their chemistry was pretty good. The fact that Butch is human and Marisa not was resolved in a pretty obvious way, although the events that happened to him earlier in the book made me wonder how the author was going to manage to resolve the issues, but she did it well in the end!
I have to say that I didn't notice the language as much this time round as I have in other books in this series, but the proliferation of label names, even in one of the love scenes, seemed to be more full on this time around.
Once again, this was a really hard to put down book, as they all have been, and the story arc that is going throughout the series was definitely developed more this time round.
So...is it too early to start counting down to Vishous' book? The excerpt and all the little titbits that have been said whilst JR Ward has been guest blogging around the place really make me want to read his story NOW!
Rating 4/5
You know, after reading LR, I went back and reread the rest of the series. It didn't endear Butch to me anymore, but I was really awed at JR's attention to detail. Because right from the beginning, Butch was affected by things the vampires were. It was just interesting to see, like whis transformation, if one was reading this series with a fine tooth comb, wouldn't have come as a surprise.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, because he was affected by Bella's needing in LA.
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