Jess

I really liked the characters and thought their relationship was well done, despite some niggles and oddities. I loved that Luki is so self-conscious about his scar, and Sonny barely sees it; he just sees Luki's beauty. That was very believable to me, as were the various things Luki did to compensate for his scar.

But the mystery made no sense to me at all. Mostly, I didn't understand the bad guy; neither his reasonings nor his machinations, and I was left trying to figure out how all the pieces we'd been given could possibly fit together.

Maybe the answer is just that he's mad and I'd have to worry about my own sanity if his actions made sense to me. But that's not the most satisfying conclusion. Plus, that doesn't explain how he got law enforcement involved at such high levels. I thought it would turn out that the bad guy was a politician or a very-high level LEO himself. Was I supposed to take the passing mention of mafia seriously, and is that the explanation?

Plus, even if I take his craziness at face-value and accept that it was all an elaborate game to him, I still don't think all the individual pieces come together in any sort of cohesive whole. Like, what the hell was Deslyn's role? I get what the bad guy wanted him for, but how did he get him involved?

And why did Luki puke all the time? For the longest time, I thought he'd been raped when he was scarred, and it was PTSD from that. But when we finally learn the real back-story of the scar, there's no mention of rape. So it ultimately seemed to me like a plot device to make him both badass and vulnerable like Sam Starrett in Suzanne Brockmann's Troubleshooters series. But where it works for Sam, it just seemed odd with Luki.

Despite all that, the book left me wanting to spend more time with these guys and see how their relationship develops - preferably with a little down time. However, reading the blurbs for the sequels has me rolling my eyes as they sound heavy on my biggest issues with this one. So I'm not sure if I'll read any more or not.