Review: Blood and Metal by Nina Croft + Giveaway

Posted on August 27, 2015August 26, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: ebook
Genre: science fiction romance
Series: Blood Hunter/Dark Desires #5
Length: 268 pages
Publisher: Entangled Publishing
Date Released: August 24, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo

She’s his last chance for redemption…if she doesn’t kill him first.

Copilot of the Blood Hunter, Daisy is a newly-turned vampire, and she’s hungry. Really hungry and it’s interfering with her plans for revenge. Unfortunately, the only thing that can distract her from said hunger is sex…which is a problem when she can barely refrain from draining any man dry within moments. But old flame Fergal Cain might just be the sexy-assed solution to her problem.

Part human, part cyborg, and with a poison coursing through his system, Fergal’s running out of time to find the scientist who has the cure. Unfortunately for him, the misfit crew of the Blood Hunter put a serious kink in his plans. And if the poison doesn’t kill him, the hot little vamp he can’t resist might do the honors herself…

My Review:

Plant girl turned vampire meets intrepid reporter turned cyborg. Or at least that’s one variation on the romance between Daisy, copilot of the Blood Hunter and Fergal Cain, escaped prisoner. However, there are many, many layers to both of their identities, and lots of both internal and external tension in this latest installment in the marvelous Blood Hunter series.

The previous book in this series, Temporal Shift (reviewed here) serves as a bit of a reboot for the series. During the events of that book, which take place on the other side of a wormhole, only six months pass for the crew of Blood Hunter. It’s during those six months that Daisy, a genetically modified young woman with a whole lot of chlorophyll in her DNA, is nearly killed and is changed into a vampire in order to save her life.

The crew of the Blood Hunter has already lost some of their nearest and dearest in the galactic power struggle that they keep finding themselves in the middle of, and Rico, who swore that he would never turn anyone again, turns Daisy to keep her with them. Especially since her near-death is all his fault.

But Daisy the vampire is also a problem. She’s hungry ALL THE TIME, and doesn’t have enough control to manage her hunger. Her crewmates are now also food, but food she doesn’t want to kill. Lucky for her, they are all immortal and can afford to feed her regularly. Rico tells her that sex will also quiet her hunger, but every single person on the Blood Hunter is part of a couple. Everyone has already found their soulmate, except for poor lonely and starving Daisy.

When they come back through the wormhole, they discover that 20 years has passed in the world they left behind, and everything has gone into the shitter. The very militant and anti-anyone-not-pure-human Church of Everlasting Life has taken control of everything, and people in general are either true believers or truly terrified.

The head of the church, Temperance Hatcher, is responsible for the deaths of too many of the Blood Hunter’s crew. And he has two of the crew as hostages, Alex and Jon. Alex has been forced to resume her role as reluctant High Priestess in order to keep her husband Jon alive. (If you’re curious about how they got together in the first place, read Deadly Pursuit (reviewed here) for the story of Alex’ escape from the Church and their unlikely romance.)

In their first unsuccessful attempt to break Jon out of prison, the crew rediscovers Fergal Cain instead. When they first met, Fergal was an investigative journalist infiltrating a company that produced cyborgs. Twenty years later, Fergal is an escaped cyborg attempting to rescue the one man who knows the details of Fergal’s condition, and the one man who can possibly keep him alive.

The Blood Hunter crew can’t leave Fergal behind, they’ve just blown his cover as a prison guard. But Fergal is certain that he can’t stay with the Blood Hunter, he’s carrying too many deadly secrets that will either get them all killed, or get him tossed out an airlock. But when he and Daisy discover that they are everything the other one needs to cure everything that ails them, he can’t make himself turn away.

Not even when it is much, much too late.

Escape Rating B+: I’ll confess to being a bit confused by the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey bits in Temporal Shift, so it was great that the author put the crew back into normal space and into a story where time behaved normally again.

At the same time, the 20 year break served as an interesting reboot. When the crew left normal space it took the leaders of the two of the three major power groups with them. So the Collective and the rebel conclave both collapsed without their leaders and the Church very much ascendant took over everything.

Rabid theocracy is not anyone’s friend in this book. In this case, the True Believers in human purity are unable to tolerate any deviance, either in DNA or in thought. The prisons are full and the people are scared, quite reasonably, to death.

Fergal Cain has a big secret that he is carrying through most of the book. However, it is a secret that is easily guessed by the reader. And my knowing what it was did not detract from the drama, because the tension always revolved around other people’s reaction to that secret, not its existence.

Daisy and Fergal make a perfect pair. He is a cyborg, and he normally has to hold back on his strength and capabilities. Daisy is a vampire who is afraid to let down her guard out of fear that she might kill her partner. Except that Daisy discovers that while Fergal may be terrific in bed, he isn’t food for her vampire. As a cyborg, he tastes terrible!

But that they are each able to let down their respective guards makes their intimacy, both physical and emotional, hard for them to resist. Fergal has never belonged to anyone or anything before, and his connection to Daisy, and through her to the crew of the Blood Hunter, kills his resolve to remain alone. It may be safer on his own, but he finally discovers that being connected to other people is worth it.

And Daisy finds herself in a relationship that is not just worth fighting for, but also worth living for, and someone with whom she may be able to share “forever”.

If you like your science fiction romance with a heaping helping of non-stop action adventure, start this series with Break Out (reviewed here). You’ll be glad you did.

TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY

As part of the tour, Nina is giving away 2 sets of the paperback copies of the first three books in the series, Break Out, Deadly Pursuit and Death Defying and 5 ecopies of Temporal Shift, book 4

a Rafflecopter giveaway

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: Temporal Shift by Nina Croft

Posted on November 17, 2014November 16, 2014 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> book reviews

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: ebook
Genre: science fiction romance
Series: Blood Hunter/Dark Desires #4
Length: 368 pages
Publisher: Entangled Select
Date Released: November 17, 2014
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, All Romance

Caught between destiny and desire…

After diving into a black hole in search of the source of Meridian, the key to immortality, the crew of the Blood Hunter finds themselves stranded in an alternate universe.

Engineer Devlin Stark doesn’t want immortality. He just wants to live long enough to get his revenge on the man who murdered his brother. Now, he’s trapped in a strange world with a crazy woman who claims he’s fated to be her lover.

Saffira Lourdes has a destiny: to save humanity and lead her exiled people to the Promised Land. Haunted by visions of the past and future, she’s been sustained through the years by a dream lover. Unfortunately, Devlin doesn’t believe in fate. But it’s obvious there’s a connection between them, one that will soon be tested by the limits of time and space. Saffira is about to make the crew of the Blood Hunter an offer they’ll find impossible to refuse.

They’re heading back to Earth, and they’re going back in time…

My Review:

First, I want to take whoever decided to play with the series title, and whoever chose the strange series listing for Temporal Shift at Goodreads and Amazon, and shake them until their teeth rattle.

It is extremely unobvious in a lot of the blurb copy, but Temporal Shift is very definitely the fourth book in Nina Croft’s awesome science fiction romance series, Blood Hunter. The series starts with Break Out (reviewed here) and continues with Deadly Pursuit (here) and Death Defying (here). Temporal Shift makes way more sense if you’ve read the other stories first.

The series is also being renamed Dark Desires, which I find less descriptive but possibly more saleable, but that just adds to the confusion.

The action in Temporal Shift follows directly from the harrowing events at the end of Death Defying, but the whole thing only works if you have at least some understanding of the players and the set up.

The owner of the ship, El Cazador, is a vampire named Rico Sanchez. The year is 3048, and the Earth as we know it was destroyed centuries ago. Only a select few made it out on large colony ships, but somehow, both the vampires and the werewolves managed to get themselves aboard those ships. (People in cryosleep don’t notice that a vampire is taking a sip, after all)

The story in Temporal Shift contains more than enough time travel to cause the crew of El Cazador to question whether everything they thought they knew about their history is actually true, or whether that temporal shift is more of a loop.

It all starts by falling (or fleeing) through a black hole to an unknown destination. When you are being pursued by not just one but two space armadas, any port in a storm, even a potentially deadly wormhole, looks like a viable escape.

But they don’t find a safe haven. What they find is that they are the starring players in a centuries old prophecy, and that it’s a bit difficult to figure out exactly where, or when, they are. What they discover is that they may have looped back to the beginning of their own history. Which means that they are in the unfortunate position of being able to screw it up completely.

Everything hinges on the local time-mancer (read prophetess) Saffira. She’s been saving herself for her destined sacrifice to history, and for a man who loves her in her dreams. Both arrive in the El Cazador, but not in the way that she expects. Finding a way to help her people escape, and getting the very angry and closed off Devlin to fall in love with her, is going to take way more time than it should. Centuries in fact, but only for her.

When the woman who returns is not quite the same woman who left, no one is sure whether any of the complex plans they have laid will work. But they have to try, or they are all doomed.

Escape Rating B+: I think this story only works if you’ve read the rest of the series, or at least the expanded edition of the first book, Break Out (which is totally awesome).

The thing about time travel stories is that they can be totally confusing if you don’t know all the history involved in the time being traveled to. And I’ll confess to getting confused, even though I have read all the books. At the same time, it was a lot of fun to meet Rico back in the 15th century. Also bloody and terrifying, but neat to see the time streams cross.

The whole story is about crossing the time streams. Callum Meridian was on the original voyage, but his ship survived and he discovered the immortality drug, Meridian. So the ship in orbit on the planet inside that black hole represents his own personal past, dropping into the middle of his present.

There is a lot about messing with time, and trying to figure out how to make sure that they all (or their ancestors) act in time to get saved so that they are not on Earth when the disaster strikes. But this is all a giant time loop, and they caused the future they now live in. This is obvious at the end, but not so much in the middle.

I never did get how Saffira’s people came to live on the planet in the black hole. In the end, it’s not as important as what she does to get them all out. It was obvious how she was going to solve the central dilemma, but that didn’t make it any less painful when she does.

I’ve enjoyed the entire Blood Hunter series quite a lot. This is science fiction romance mixed with a very interesting bit of world building. And that world building only gets more convoluted (and fascinating) with the time travel explorations of Temporal Shift. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: Death Defying by Nina Croft + Giveaway

Posted on March 6, 2014February 28, 2014 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways

Format read: ebook provided by NetGalley
Formats available: ebook, paperback
Genre: science fiction romance
Series: Blood Hunter #3
Length: 286 pages
Publisher: Entangled: Select
Date Released: February 24, 2014
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, All Romance

Part snake, part human, and—some would say all bitch—Captain Tannis of the starship El Cazador has one goal in life—to earn enough credits to pay for the Meridian treatment to achieve the immortality she craves. And one last job will get her there. The assignment: protecting the most powerful man in the Universe.

Being leader of the known universe isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it sucks big time. And after five hundred years, Callum Meridian, founding member of the Collective, is bored out of his mind. But as things are changing, he’s changing—into what, though, he isn’t sure. Callum is determined to discover the truth, and he’s employed the crew of El Cazador to help him do it.

Not everyone agrees with his plan, though. His own people will stop at nothing to prevent the truth coming out, the Church is taking advantage of the confusion and attempting a coup, and even the crew of El Cazador seem close to tossing him out the airlock without a space suit. But defying death has never been more dangerous, sexier, or more fun.

My Review:

Death Defying begins its action/adventure/romance/space opera story just at the point where Deadly Pursuit leaves off.

And the crew of El Cazador is being pursued, with deadly intent, yet again. It looks like all the forces they have previously defeated are out to get them, once in for all.

It doesn’t help that the Collective and the Church are out to get each other, with the crew of El Cazador seemingly caught like fish in a large, space-spanning barrel.

The Collective controls the immortality-granting drug Meridian. After 500 years, the founding members of the Collective have a few problems. They’ve managed to gain control of the galaxy, or at least their corner of it, by their control of the drug. People who defy them are banned from ever receiving “the treatment” that gives them not just immortality, but membership in the elite circle that controls the system. Very few people are willing to lose their chance at the drug, no matter how high the price for it or how slim the chance that they could ever receive it.

But Meridian has a downside–doesn’t everything? Those who take it are not just made immortal, they are irrevocably changed. Everyone knows that members of the Collective are telepathic with the group. But the whole “growing wings” thing is totally unexpected. The members of the Collective are becoming something other than human. In a system where many people consider Genetic Modification to be “less than human”, what will winged people be?

Also, a lot of inhumane acts have been committed in order to keep the supply of Meridian flowing to the select few who qualify. But the supply has run out. The planet where Meridian was found is all tapped out.

The Collective doesn’t want to relinquish their control by admitting that they can’t elect anyone else into the club. Their leader wants to let the whole “wing thing” out into the open. Quite possibly because he’s tired of hiding the fact that he can fly. He wants to test those things out!

When the Council turns down his request for the big reveal, he goes to plan B–escape on El Cazador. The fee he’s paying for their assistance is the last bit of coin that Captain Tannis needs to fund her own Meridian treatment.

Instead, the Council betrays its leader, Callum Meridian, and plans on using double-and-triple crosses to get the Church of Everlasting Life to destroy the planetary source of Meridian in a blaze of glory–so they have a public scapegoat for the end of the supply.

Both the Church and the Collective plan on catching Callum in the cross-fire; the Church because it has decreed the Collective as anathema, and the Collective because Callum wants to delve into secrets that the Collective wants hidden.
Both sides have tackled with the crew of El Cazador before, and wiping them off the face of the galaxy would be a pleasure for either side.

But the crew is much too clever to go down without a fight. Several fights. Especially now that they have recruited their own rebel alliance to help even the odds.

Callum Meridian has been unwilling to admit that immortality has gotten boring. On El Cazador he discovers that fighting for his life, and the lives of the crew who have managed to become friends–is the opposite of boring.

Falling in love is the best experience of all, and one he thought he was no longer capable of. But will loving and losing be worth the price, if he has to live with it forever?

Escape Rating B: Death Defying, and the entire Blood Hunter series so far, has been an absorbing combination of space opera and romance. In Break Out, as much as I adored it, the space opera took a backseat to the romance. In Death Defying, it’s the romance that takes the backseat, and the space opera political maneuvering that comes to the fore.

All three romances have been between a man who has been around entirely too much, and a woman who has little or no experience of sex, love or romance. Not necessarily because they are young, but because their lives have otherwise excluded romantic possibilities.

The heroine of Death Defying, Captain Tannis, almost seems too damaged to have changed so fast. She was experimented upon by a mysterious lab for 14 years, from the ages of 4 until she turned 18, and she can’t stand to be touched. She wants Meridian so she can hunt down the people who tormented her. Callum is the first man she’s ever let touch her, and she manages to forgive him for letting that lab, and other inhumane acts, be perpetrated on his watch as head of the Collective.

I didn’t quite buy into their romance, but the political machinations and Callum’s search for the secrets to Meridian kept me on the edge of my seat. The Church and the Collective are using each other, and both want to wipe out El Cazador. That ship is in everyone’s sights, and it takes a huge trick for them to escape both sets of clutches.

It was difficult to believe that the Church could get even more evil than they were in Deadly Pursuit, but they hit new lows. Not that the Collective is any better.

Riding the spacelanes on El Cazador has been so damn much fun that I’ll be sorry to see it end. I thought that Death Defying wrapped up all the loose ends left over from the first two books in the series, the fabulous Break Out and the terrific Deadly Pursuit. I was incredibly pleased, but I’ll admit also slightly surprised, to see that the author has two more books planned for the series.

I can hardly wait to see how she picks this up from where she left us this time!

TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY

Nina is generously giving away a $25 Amazon Gift Card to one lucky commenter on the tour. To enter, just fill out the Rafflecopter below. For more chances to win, check out the other stops on the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

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