I don’t think I’m going to make my goal this year of finishing all the series I’ve started, but the progress I have made has been largely via audiobook. Since I read (and loved) the first book in this series last year, I couldn’t wait to get to the sequel, but I also didn’t think I would realistically get a chance to read it this year, so I went with the audiobook and loved it.
The romance in this book is between Stevie and Shen, the panda-shifter bodyguard of Kyle, an artistic prodigy who doesn’t seem to care about anyone but himself, but is somehow still friends with Stevie. The book starts with Shen finding Stevie cowering in one of the kitchen cupboards because there are bear-shifters in the house. They’re not even in bear form, but Stevie is still afraid of them, so Shen manages to convince the bears to leave and coax Stevie out of the cupboards.
When Shen isn’t trying to calm Stevie down or trying to prevent Kyle from getting killed, he’s eating bamboo, because apparently pandas are constantly eating bamboo and Shen seems to share that trait with his animal form. He eats other things, too, but he prefers all things bamboo, including bamboo tea, and at one point Charlie bakes him some kind of pastry with bamboo, and he really enjoys that, too. But bamboo is very crunchy so there are a lot of jokes about how much noise Shen is constantly making. For a bodyguard, he’s certainly not stealthy.
My favorite part of their relationship is that Stevie just decides they’re dating. Shen keeps trying to tell her he’s not her boyfriend, but she just says that, once she’s made up her mind, it’s made up. Shen doesn’t have a chance because Stevie is adorable and lovable, in addition to being incredibly smart and persistent.
Of course, if Shen really didn’t want to date Stevie, he shouldn’t have had sex with her, but this is a Shelly Laurenston book, so of course they have sex, after which Shen tries to tell Stevie they’re just casual, but Stevie doesn’t listen to that any more than she listened to him when he said they weren’t dating.
By the end of the book, Shen has given in and admitted that he’s head over heels in love with Stevie. Stevie asks if he wants to live in Switzerland so she can finish up the work she was doing there, or if they should stay in NYC, but I’m guessing there will be at least one more book in this series, and it needs Stevie, so I can’t imagine they’ll be leaving New York any time soon.
I also love that Shen tries to get Stevie interested in sports because she has zero muscle, but she’s good at everything she tries because it’s all just physics and she’s a physics wiz. But she doesn’t enjoy anything until he introduces her to soccer, which she quickly decides she loves.
But, as with other Laurenston books, the romance is not the main attraction. Early on in the book, one of the sisters’ uncles is murdered, and they’re surprised to learn that they have to attend the funeral, even though they didn’t even know this uncle existed. I also don’t think they know he was murdered, but they end up going to the funeral, which of course their father crashes and tries to use to get money out of the relatives he had recently stolen from because he’s just that dumb. At one point Freddy is run over by a semi, but still doesn’t die because he is apparently unkillable.
The psychotic cousins from the first book make a couple more appearances in this book, but I think Laurenston is saving them for a big showdown in the final book. They get into the sisters’ house and attack Max at one point, but Stevie and Charlie intervene, forcing their cousin to flee. One of the two giant dogs that belong to Berg and his brothers, even though the dogs have adopted Stevie, tries to intervene in the fight and gets shot. He has to have emergency surgery, and he’s in critical condition for a while, but they manage to save him, and Shen has to learn to live with sharing Stevie’s bed with the two dogs who consider it their bed.
The main threat in this book turns out to be an ex-boyfriend of Stevie’s – a biogeneticist who wants to eliminate hybrid shifters because he thinks they’re an abomination. His solution is to give them a drug that will eliminate their shifter DNA, but while he’s perfecting the drug, there’s no guarantee that his subjects will survive. He doesn’t give them the option of turning him down. He kidnaps Stevie and a couple other hybrid shifters to use as guinea pigs.
Stevie has actually been wanting to get rid of her shifter side for a while because she has never learned to control her shifting. She shifts into a giant tiger-striped honey badger whenever she gets scared or startled, and because she’s so large and catlike, she definitely poses a danger to those around her. Only her sisters can get her to calm down, but not usually before she’s hurt someone. Stevie doesn’t want to hurt anyone, so she’s been thinking for a while that it might be time to find a way to get rid of her shifter DNA, even though no one else likes this idea because her tiger-striped honey badger is a part of who she is. They’d much rather she learn to control it.
Because she’s afraid of what she does when she’s scared/startled/stressed, Stevie has done a lot of therapy and learned a lot of calming techniques, such as meditation and deep breathing. One of my favorite scenes in the book was when Stevie takes her sisters with her to see a local therapist and the therapist lists off all the trauma all three women have been through, then asks if Stevie is the only one who needs therapy? Charlie and Max confirm that to be the case and Stevie just gives the therapist a knowing look and a shrug. The therapist responds by taking Charlie to see one of her colleagues and Max to see a different colleague who specializes in sociopaths. It made me laugh, even though Max isn’t really a sociopath. She loves her sisters too much to be a sociopath.
But it comes in handy later on in the book when Charlie uses tools her therapist must have taught her to cope with stress and avoid assuming the worst case scenario. I hope we get to see Max in therapy in the next book, but I’m not holding my breath.
Anyhoo, back to the sociopath trying to rid Stevie and her friends of their shifter DNA. Stevie volunteers to go first, so she gets injected with the drug that is designed to destroy her shifter DNA, and her ex has set it up so she can watch on a screen what’s going on in her cells while the drug is doing it’s thing. Turns out the drug starts to destroy her shifter DNA, but her shifter DNA comes back with a vengeance and destroys the drug trying to destroy it. Then she shifts in order to break herself and her friends out of their prison, so by the time Charlie, Max, and the others get there to rescue her, she doesn’t need rescuing.
I’m not actually sure if she killed her ex when she was in her giant tiger-striped honey badger form. She was playing with him the way a cat would play with a mouse, and he was definitely injured, but shifters are very, very difficult to kill, so I’m not sure if he was dead by the end or just unconscious…