Ren has always danced along the fine line between being a little bit crazy and being overcome by a darkness that’s haunted him since his mortal days. As an empath, he prefers to live far from people who would leak their emotions all over him, so he’s not expecting the woman who drives right into the heart of his wood. She has a cursed book with her and demons hot on her heels. Even more surprising are her abilities and the reaction Ren has to her.My Thoughts: Apparently, my obsessive need to read things in order has completely abandoned me with this series since I've been reading them backwards thus far. Go figure. On the plus side, reading them out of order doesn't detract from the overall series. I mean, maybe I would have enjoyed the revisiting of previous main characters a bit more, but I totally understood what was going on. Totally. By the by, I will say that one of the things I like most about these books (besides the hot sex) is trying to figure out which fairy tale we're dealing with. In this case, Shiloh Walker threw me a curve ball and I didn't see this one coming. At all.
Aileas is on the run. She just isn’t certain if she’s running from something real or imagined. One thing is for sure, her brother is dead and she’s certain the book she found has something to do with his death. She really starts to doubt her sanity when she meets a hot but somewhat crazed man in the middle of nowhere.
He calls himself Ren, and although he doesn’t seem to be out to hurt her, he definitely seems to want something. She just doesn’t understand what. She does know what she wants though. She wants him, and the shadows and darkness she glimpses inside him don’t matter. At least, right up until he claims to be a guardian angel.
And she thought she was going crazy.
Ren's isolation from the world and his fellow Grimm was well laid out. You get a real sense that Mandy's presence in his life is already a big concession. Having a stranger drop in on him who happens to have a pack of demons on her tail just makes things so very much worse. His insanity pushes and pulls at him and he feels an answering spark in Aileas that draws him as he hasn't been drawn to anyone in ages. The slow unfolding of his story is sad and heartbreaking. Her story is also a sad journey, but nowhere near poor Ren's.
In the end, it was a solid piece of storytelling that pulled me in with the glimpses of Ren's past and the heat between Ren and Aileas. I liked it. I liked it a lot.
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Other reviews in this series:
Book 4: Tarnished Knight
More books by Shiloh Walker
Uh no, totally did NOT see that coming at.all! Like you, I kept trying to figure out which fairy tale we were reading. What a GREAT turn/spin. But, as with the first 2 in the series (which YES you must read :) ) it was FANTASTIC! I do so love her spin on "traditional" fairy tales :).
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