Monday, February 11, 2008

Mine to Possess

Author: Nalini Singh
Published: February 5, 2008 (Berkley)
Category: Paranormal Romance
Series: Psy/Changeling #4
Rating: 8/10

I have a feeling I'm going to cop out on a lot of the next several reviews and use the cover blurb to summarize the story.

Clay Bennett is a powerful DarkRiver sentinel, but he grew up in the slums with his human mother, never knowing his changeling father. As a young boy without the bonds of Pack, he tried to stifle his animal nature. He failed... and committed the most extreme act of violence, killing a man, and lost his best friend, Talin, in the bloody aftermath. Everything good in him died the day he was told that she, too, was dead.

Talin McKade barely survived a childhood drenched in bloodhsed and terror. Now a new nightmare stalks her - the street children she works to protect are disappearing and turning up dead. Determined to keep them safe, she unlocks the darkest secret in her heart and returns to ask the help of the strongest man she knows...

Clay lost Talin once. he will not let her go again and hungers to possess her with a clawing need born of the leopard within. As they race to save the innocent, Clay and Talin must face the violent truths of their past... or lose everything that ever mattered.

This is the first book with a human hero/heroine, and Tally, seeing herself as the weak half of the couple, has a hard time with the fact that she's a plain ol' human. To make things worse, she's got some untreatable brain illness and will die soon. But Clay doesn't care about any of those things because he'll find a way to overcome them so he can be with her finally.

The plot thickens in the war against the Psy. They're conducting experiments on what seems to be a random selection of children, but with the Psy, everything has a purpose. It's creepy when you think about how cold the Psy are, with the attitude that their way is the logical way. They believe it so much that the idea of right and wrong no longer exists for them. There's only ONE way, so why do we need a moral right and wrong?

Caressed by Ice is still my favorite in the series, but this was a good read. I do love my alpha males. I'm pretty excited about the next book in the series, Hostage to Pleasure, which features Dorian, the latent leopard, and Ayasha, the Psy scientist who actually cares for her son, and engineered the escape of her test subjects in Mine to Possess. HtP is scheduled for September release.

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