Tamara is a Hunter and member of an organisation of
hunters that watches and polices the supernatural – and kills those that step
too far out of line. She works alongside her Tracker, Nicholas, his magical
ability leading him to their targets.
Unfortunately, there’s far more than magic between them –
there’s an awful lot of unrequited love and lust between them too.
Unfortunately, their organisations rules expressly forbids such fraternisation
Worse, a lover of one of their targets seeks revenge –
and has the magic to make it happen.
There were some elements of this book I loved – mainly the
concept. Pairs of Hunters and Trackers working together in cells to police the
supernatural sounds like an extremely fun concept.
But there were problems with it. And I think most of
those stem from the fact that the book is very very short – but it has enough
material to fill a much bigger book or even a series. It has a long history,
these characters have a long history, it was a wide world, it has a lot that it
doesn’t necessarily need to explain to tell the story – but it is a lot that it
wants to explain. But without a long story to convey all that world building,
what we get is info dump.
A lot of info dumps. And they’re not even close to
naturally integrated into the story. The Nicholas and Tamara simply sit down
and think. We have these epicly long internal monologues where they review
their history, they review their past attraction, they review the very point of
the Brotherhood, they review the Brotherhood’s history, they think about the
nature of Trackers and Hunters and they have a dream sequence where it
describes the Brotherhood’s headquarters – a building they never actually go
to.
All of this is conveyed literally by them thinking. Just
sitting down, doing nothing and deciding to recount this vast amount of
information to us.
On top of that, Tamara and Nicholas think each other are
sexy. Really sexy. Really really sexy. And they let us know with more massive
info dumps about what they both look like, how attractive they find each other,
physical descriptions of each other (Nicholas’s eyes are brown, cinnamon
coloured, we’re told this a lot) and how irresistible they both are to each
other and how tragic it is that the rules state they can never be together for
some reason (don’t tell me they’d be too
distracted – these 2 can’t do anything without the sexiness of the other
overwhelming their every thought. The sexual tension alone is more distracting
than any amount of true love ever could be). In the beginning of the book, Tamara seduces a
werewolf in order to kill him and the majority of her thoughts are dedicated to
how sexy Nicholas is even when he isn’t there.
I have to say that, as far as infodumping goes, these
infodumps aren’t bad. Partly because the world they’re talking about is
interesting – the Brotherhood is a group of hereditary hunters trained to
police the supernatural community. They fight in pairs, Hunter warriors and
Tracker spell-casters. It’s not a bad concept, it’s pretty interesting how it
is proposed and it has great potential to be developed. But no matter how well
done your infodump or how much your infodump reveals an interesting world, it
doesn’t change the fact it’s a rather contrived infodump
Nor the fact there’s not a lot of plot around the
infodump and the constant musing about how so very very hot the other is. We
start with a battle to kill a werewolf, then a bad guy launches on an elaborate
revenge plot that is needlessly convoluted (villains, learn to just kill your
enemies!) They have a fight scene that didn’t work for me since it relied on
one character who was too weak to stand a scene ago suddenly being able to
fight, and the big bad both deciding to attack people with their bare hands
DESPITE their lethal and awesome magic and decided to run away despite being
the clear winner.
It’s capped off by one of the most anti-climactic endings
I’ve come across in a long time, not only lacking in any real dramatic confrontation,
but relied on a boss coming by with some super-special tracking ability that
only his special tracker could know.
It’s a shame really – the writing style in between wasn’t
bad, and the world is certainly intriguing – but it was rushed. There was too
much crammed into a small place, a desperate urge to fit all of this world and
setting into a novella which would have been better done with a slow reveal –
which applies to the romance as well. If there had been a chance to slowly
reveal the mutual attraction and love between them, there wouldn’t have needed
to be such heavy handed exposition. Also the line “velvet petals of her folds yielded to him” is being added to the
purple prose list.
But I have a feeling the author had a great world idea, a
pretty decent concept (the true love match who have to work together but can
never consummate their love) but didn’t really have a story to back it up.
A copy of thi book was received in exchange for a review
