The Sinner by J. R. Ward

Unfortunately, I did not read Blood Truth before I read The Sinner, which is a must, so if you haven’t done so, drop Sinner and go read Blood Truth so you won’t be as confused as I was. BT introduces Syn and his proclivities, so it’s important.

Now, The Sinner is about one of the Band of Bastards, his name given only as Syn. Syn is a complex character with a huge chip on his shoulder. In the old country, he was known for killing bad people and playing with their corpses.  The Bastards know about it, but the Brotherhood does not. When they learn they’re none too happy about it, but he seems to have not brought the habit with him to the new country, so they let it slide.

Except, bodies are stacking up, and so are the facts. Is Syn the Sinner everyone thinks him to be?

And of course, there’s a girl. There’s always a girl. Jo is a half-vampire who doesn’t know what she is, what she’s to become. And she’s obsessed with finding out the truth of some of the weird goings-on in Caldwell, mainly, are vampires really real? The Brothers have been systematically wiping her memory of things she’s seen on the chance that she doesn’t transition and become and real vampire. Little does she know she’s been sleeping with one all along....


There are a few typos, especially early in the book, but not enough to harsh your mellow. Read on.

Blood Truth by J. R. Ward

I keep thinking Ward has jumped the shark with her leather-clad warriors, but somehow she keeps it fresh. The Blood series is about the apprentice warriors who signed up for the Black Daggar training program. It concerns itself with the lives of the trainees. Blood Truth is about Boone, a glymera son who finds himself cut out of the will in favor of his father’s lover, his butler.

But Boone doesn’t care about the money. He just wants distance. While on leave from patrolling due to the sudden death of his father and stepmother at the shadow’s hands (and in the middle of a treasonous gathering, to boot), Boone is tasked by Butch to help him solve a series of gruesome murders. The sister of the murdered woman is Helania (and just how do you pronounce that? HEL-ah-Knee-ah?) who catches his eye immediately, and he finds himself knee-deep in mating hormones.

I will say this: the world is getting really crowded with bad guys who have no resolution. Ward needs to clean things up a bit, with all the story arcs all over the place. They’re hard to keep up with. Whatever happened with Throe? Or did it happen and I forgot about it after I read it?

Anyway, I’ll keep reading as long as Ward keeps writing. Love me some leather.

Embracing Destiny

I love Hutchins. I do. That being said, I think the quality of her writing is going downhill. Embracing Destiny was hastily written, by her own admission. And there's a sequel, or rather, a part two coming. That's fine.

Here is the issue. And maybe it's just an issue for me personally, because I require more from my authors than just sex sex sex. There's a lot of it in here, which is fine I suppose. Except that it's not especially sexy. It's kind of rape-y, with a heavy dose is BDSM, which again, is fine if you're into that, and I've been known to be into it. I just couldn't connect to the scenes in any way, which made them unsexy. In fact, I had trouble connecting to the whole book, which has never been a problem for me with Hutchins' Fae series.

Here is one problem: she apparently does zero research for her characters. Yes, they're made up, but some of them are based on existing legends, and if you use some of the facts of those legends to flesh out your character, it gives your book real depth. Take Ilona Andrews and Patricia Briggs for example. If ones of them refers to a character of legend, you can look that character up and see that they've used some of the actual legend to give that character life. That's a mark of a great author.

Then there's the typos and repetitive word use. Flesh is used 61 times (although down from her all time high of 123 times), and pretty is used 54 times (also a reduction, but not enough). The thesaurus is free. Seriously. When you can make it a drinking game, it's too much. There are 47 typos that I personally caught. There could be more. And they were typos. The grammar was pretty good for the most part.

In a conversation, Hutchins told me she used 3 different word processors to edit her books. And therein lies her problem. An algorithm is no substitute for a sharp pair of eyes. They don't catch homonyms. Ever.

I will say this book was edited better than her last one by A LOT. But it's still not good enough.