I was coming up on a day full of housework a few weeks ago and wondering what audiobook I was going to listen to to keep my mind occupied while my hands were busy. Even though it had only been a few weeks since I had listened to the second book in this series by Shelly Laurenston, it was so much fun I decided to jump back in and listen to this one before the year ends, so I can check this series off my new years resolution.
This book was every bit as much fun as the previous books, if not more so since it focuses on Max “Kill It Again” MacKilligan who only cares about two things: her sisters and having fun.
The book starts with Max getting kidnapped, but it’s not told from her perspective. It’s told from the perspective of ZeZé Vargas, one of the men who’s been hired to kidnap Max. Unlike the other guys in the van, he’s a double agent who’s real job is to make sure Max gets out of there safely.
Max immediately pegs ZeZé for a “cat” but he has no idea what she’s talking about. Turns out his parents both died when he was young and he was raised by his grandfather who thought he was protecting him by not telling him what he really was.
I will never understand that rationale. How are you keeping someone safe by refusing to help them understand the changes their body is going through as they grow up? It’s not like ZeZé would ever not be a panther shifter. And shifters can smell what he is right away, which means if they want to do him harm, you’re only putting him at a disadvantage by not telling him what he can do.
Anyway, so it takes a while for poor ZeZé to believe what the crazy lady is telling him. Even when he’s at the MacKilligans’ house and he sees men shift into bears and vice versa, he still refuses to believe because it could be an hallucination caused by a drug the women may have given him. Max points out that if it were the drugs, he would be the only one who saw the bears. As it is, they all saw the same thing, which suggests it’s not an hallucination.
ZeZé (understandably) still refuses to believe for a while, but eventually he comes to terms with it. Then he decides to do some research into his parents to see if he’s only half shifter and his grandfather never told him because he didn’t know, but nope. Both his parents were shifters, and they didn’t die in a car crash, like he was always told. They were collateral damage in a shifter fight, which is why ZeZé’s grandfather never told him the truth. It’s still a stupid reason.
Meanwhile, Max’s cousins are still trying to kill her and her sisters, so they have to deal with that. Also their uncle and his sons are living with them since they got blown up on a plane. Stevie manages to convince them to get a hotel room, even though they’ve been permanently banned from one of the nicer hotels.
Then the house gets invaded by a bunch of tigers demanding to know what the MacKilligans have done with their sister. Turns out their deaf sister has been kidnapped by Frank MacKilligan, and the tigers assume Frank’s daughters are in on it. Of course they don’t know anything about it, and once they understand what’s happened, they agree to help the tigers find their sister.
Despite being the worst person ever, Frank has not violated the deaf teenaged girl. Nor does he have any intention of doing so. When they find out the girl is a genius hacker, Max and her sisters assume he’s taken the girl and is forcing her to use her hacker skills to try to get back all the money he stole and lost, but that turns out not to be right either.
In a twist to end all twists, it turns out that the girl is yet another MacKilligan half sister and Frank had run off with her so he could “get to know his daughter,” which of course infuriates poor Stevie more than anything else he’s ever done. Also, the young girl (whose name escapes me) had not been kidnapped, and went with him willingly to get to know her dad.
This is not to say their relationship was all sunshine and roses. When Stevie starts screaming at Frank, the youngest half-sister says, “So I’m not the only one he does that to?”
Also in the course of the book, we learn that Max plays professional women’s basketball in a shifter league, which apparently pays better than full-human female sports. She was even voted MVP one year, and when Charlie finds out, she’s devastated to realize Max has a whole part of her life she’s never shared with her sisters. She feels like a terrible sister, but Max (of course) doesn’t see the big deal. She never told her sisters about it because her sisters always had better things to worry about and she didn’t want to drag them away from things like trying to stay alive just to go see one of her basketball games.
If you ask me, it sounds like Laurenston got to the third book and realized she didn’t have any real character development for Max, other than being a borderline psychopath, so she came up with basketball and then had to create excuses for why it had never been mentioned before. Either way, I don’t care because I still had a lot of fun reading this book.
If you read these books for the sex scenes, just be aware that I think there’s only one such scene in this book. This romance is much more of a slow burn than the previous two, and there is one scene that starts to get steamy, but the couple gets interrupted.