Month: August 2016

Heart of Venom

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Courtesy of jenniferestep.comBook nine of the Elemental Assassin series is Heart of Venom. This one is a little different than the ones before it, because it hits a little closer to home for Gin and the others. With Owen Grayson back in the fold but Gin not fully on board with taking him back, the ladies decide that a spa day is in order.

Luckily for them, the know the best beautician in all of Ashland, Jo-Jo Devereaux. Jo-Jo closes her salon for the day, Gin whips up some goodies and the girls of the group (Gin, Jo-Jo, Bria, Roslyn and Sophia) are all set for a day of relaxation.

The day is unfortunately ruined by the return of an old, old enemy of the Devereaux’s. Harley Grimes is a half-giant, half-dwarf with fire elemental powers and a real nasty streak to him. His sister (half-sister maybe?) is even worse. And Harley wants Sophia back.

Years ago, when Fletcher Lane was still active, he rescued Sophia from the Grimes’ mountain retreat outside of Ashland. Sophia had been tortured by both Grimes’, leading to her mangled voice and job getting rid of bodies for Fletcher. Grimes never came after her while Fletcher lived because he was scared of Fletcher, but now he knows Fletcher is dead and he wants what’s his. And can I just say screw guys who think of women as property? Ugh!

Grimes kidnaps Sophia from Jo-Jo’s spa, shooting Jo-Jo and hurting the others. Gin tried and failed to get Sophia back before they lit out but she needed to save Jo-Jo too. She and the others haul everyone up to Cooper’s place. He doesn’t have much experience using his air magic for healing, but he tries, saving Jo-Jo for the time being.

While that’s happening, Gin decides to head for Grimes. No one messes with her family and lives. The others are varying levels of unhappy and supportive. They all want Sophia back, but they don’t want her to go off half-cocked, which is a very un-Gin-like thing to do. Eventually, she caves and takes Owen up to Warren Fox’s joint for information.

Warren doesn’t live too far from Grimes and apparently he’d been the one to take Fletcher up there in the first place. With his expertise, Gin gets close. Close enough to rescue Sophia but at the expense of her own freedom. This isn’t the first time Gin has been captured and tortured. It isn’t even the first time she’s been on the receiving end of fire elemental magic. It feels a little different though because Grimes and his sister are severely unhinged, where as the others Gin has faced were more methodical and collected in their psychosis.

It’s almost lucky for Gin that Grimes likes to play cat and mouse games with his captives because no one is better at playing than the Spider. Not that they believe she’s the Spider at first, but they do eventually as she takes out man after man in an effort to get back down the mountain.

At one point, Grimes’ men think they’ve killed her. It’s only fair as she jumps off a freaking cliff to get away from them. But Owen finds her, using his metal elemental magic to track down the silverstone embedded in her hands. He never left the mountain, just getting the injured Sophia and Warren down to the car and on their way. He just couldn’t leave Gin alone up on the mountain.

Together, they make it down off the mountain and back to Cooper’s place where Jo-Jo and Sophia are recovering and surrounded by their friends/family. Once Gin and Owen are healed, everyone plans out how to finally kill Harley and Hazel Grimes, because those two (or at least Harley) will never stop until Sophia is theirs.

I felt this book was a bit more on the emotional side for Gin. She’s up in the air about Owen and then her family is kidnapped and hurt right in front of her. She feels helpless and angry, which she isn’t used to. I think it sort of rounds her out, makes her a bit more relatable. It’s also hella tough to read at points, especially some of the bits about Grimes and what he likes to do to women. Still, it’s well worth the read. Rating: A but be warned, this is a tough read.

Deadly Sting

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I know, I know. It’s been a while. In my defense, I’ve had some hella busy weekends lately. 🙂 At any rate, let’s move on with Jennifer Estep’s 8th Elemental Assassin book, Deadly Sting.

Courtesy of goodreads.comWe open up with Finn trying to get his adoptive sister, Gin Blanco, out of her post-Owen break-up funk. If you recall, Gin saved him, most of Ashland’s major players and most importantly Owen’s own sister Eva Grayson from certain death at the hands of his ex-girlfriend Salina. Owen had to stop seeing her because he’d begged Gin to not kill Salina, so that he could get her help, but Gin killed her anyway. And good riddance, quite frankly. The character was a grade A, unrepentant psycho. She would have killed Owen eventually, he just doesn’t want to face the fact that his piss poor judgment as a young kid got his sister tortured for weeks as an even younger kid.

Finn’s idea of getting Gin out of her funk is certainly not something Gin would generally volunteer for. He’s taking her to a gala museum event where Mab Monroe’s art will be on display. Gin isn’t terribly interested but she agreed to accompany her brother, even if she does have to suffer through dress/shoe/handbag shopping with clothes horse Finn.

She’s sort of getting into the exhibits when her ex, Owen, shows up with a woman on his arms. The woman could be a carbon copy of Gin, including the supposedly one of a kind dress she’s wearing. Obviously, this portends bad things for the woman. Not from Gin, but from the writer. The only reason to have two similar looking women wearing the same dress at a social function where everyone is wearing bespoke is to kill one of them. That one is not Gin.

See, this exhibit is just too tempting a target. All of Ashland’s richest in one place (seriously, they love to gather. It’s like they want to be robbed and/or killed. See Widow’s Web) plus Mab Monroe’s exclusive collection of art and jewelry? That’s one massive haul. And that is, apparently, what a band of giants lead by one Clementine, her daughter Opal and a nephew whose name I can’t be bothered to remember.

Gin, by now, is known as the Spider, so it isn’t exactly surprising when Owen’s date (Jillian? She didn’t have much of a presence to be honest), gets killed in her stead. That was what she was there for, after all. Gin is devastated, knowing that she was the reason this innocent woman’s face was quite literally blown off, but uses the fact that everyone thinks she’s dead (save Finn, who recognized at once that Jillian wasn’t his sister) to start picking off giants.

When the giants force Owen, who has a minor elemental skill for metal, to open a huge safe holding yet more of Mab’s collection, Gin makes it her mission to rescue him, even though the guy totally doesn’t deserve it at this point. He promised not to do what Donovan Caine did and just leave her because of what she was…and then he did the same damn thing anyway. What a tool.

Gin manages to sneak out of the museum and outside of the range of some cell phone jammers that the giants were using (not stupid, the giants in this series. Or at least, not all of them). She gets a quick message off to her sister, Detective Bria Coolidge, and Bria’s partner Xavier before heading in and rescuing Owen.

Gin manages to get him clear, find what Clementine was really after (Mab’s will) and to kill not only the daughter and the nephew, but big bad mama Clementine herself before the night is through. She also figures out that Jonah McAllister is behind the whole damn thing and, at the end of the book, outs the fact to all of Ashland’s high society. All of which are some sort of underworld presence. They are not happy, to say the least.

Owen pulls his head out of his ass and asks Gin for a second chance, giving her two pendants that he’d swiped from the museum in the confusion. The pendants once belonged to Gin’s mother and eldest sister, and really shouldn’t have been display pieces in the first place. I’m a little upset, though, that it takes Owen thinking that Gin had died for him to realize what an asshole he’d been. He should have come to that conclusion much, much earlier when his sister was on his ass for his stupidity.

The one redeeming thing of that request to get back together is that Gin doesn’t immediately hop in his lap and say take me big boy. She’s justifiably wary and says that he can come around, can try and get back in her good graces but that she doesn’t trust him anymore. He’ll have to earn that shit back. Good for you girl!

While this was a well written book, it was just a little too trope-y for my tastes. The woman in the matching red dress? The supposed death bringing the ex back into the fold? The heist that’s a cover-up for something else? No, it felt like it was a cop-out to get Owen and Gin back together. I would say that you’re not really missing anything meaningful in this story arc if you skip this one. Rating: C.