After reading Badger to the Bone, I had thought I was done with this series by Shelly Laurenston because that one was about the last of the MacKilligan sisters, but I was so pleased to learn I was wrong! I love hanging out with these characters so much!
In Badger to the Bone, we learned Max is part of a professor shifter women’s basketball team, which seemed like a weird thing to throw into the third book without having ever mentioned it before. Now I realize it was so Laurenston could introduce Max’s teammates, all of whom also happen to be at least part badger.
Badger to the Bone also introduced Nat, who is half sister to the MacKilligans thanks to their father’s apparent need to sow his wild oats.
We also met Nat’s 3 half brothers on her mom’s side: the Malone brothers, a.k.a. “The black Malones” because they all shift into black tigers, something that is apparently very rare and usually only happens once in a generation or so.
Nat has been raised by her mom and 3 brothers and they consider her to be a Malone. But once Charlie and her other half sisters learn they have another half sister, they can’t just walk away from that.
Honestly, I can’t remember how Max’s teammates started hanging out with the Malone brothers in this book. It probably had something to do with the fact that they have a big playoff game coming up and Mads won’t let them do much other than practice when they’re not eating or sleeping.
Although Laurenston likes to headhop a lot in her books, it’s pretty easy to tell from the POV that Mads and Finn are going to end up together. But, like every good romance, it takes them a while to get there. Mads is so emotionally scarred she won’t even admit that her teammates are her friends, even though she has no other friends, and her teammates all come through for each other even for non-basketball related situations.
Finn first meets Mads when he finds her sleeping in his cabinet. Apparently she’s used to sleeping in cabinets because they were one of the only safe spaces when she was growing up. Cabinets and the space under the couch. And her local basketball court.
Mads has also been crashing at Max’s house while getting ready for the playoffs, but everyone agrees this is unsustainable, so they help her buy a house in the neighborhood. When I say “help,” I mean with logistics, not financially. Turns out she has a pile of cash and a bunch of extremely valuable paintings in a storage locker.
Finn is a former marine and pro football player who makes the mistake of telling Mads that basketball isn’t a real sport. When she doesn’t dismember him for that, it tips off her teammates to the fact that she really, really likes him because no one else has ever been allowed to walk away unscathed after saying something so stupid to her.
Fast forward to the end of the book, and of course Finn admits to Mads that he was wrong and basketball is a real sport… but only when she plays it. Of course she still disagrees, but she’s not willing to argue the point with him.
As with most of Laurenston’s books, the romance is there, but it takes a back seat to the action. This book only has one sex scene, but a whole lot of violence. At one point Mads and her teammates all get kidnapped by a Chinese gang so they can get money out of Nelle’s dad. But they have no idea what they’re dealing with. They’re shifters, too, and they know these women are shifters, but they have no idea how hard it is to kill a honey badger.
Finn witnesses Mads getting thrown out a window and on top of a car (which is totaled) before getting up and running back into the action. Then he witnesses Max and a couple of her teammates getting thrown into an incinerator. They punch their way through steel and concrete to get their revenge on the guys who thought they had killed them.
When Charlie shows up, she really puts the Yuns in their place, killing the boss’ daughter, despite the fact that the Yun woman shifts into a giant tiger and Charlie can’t shift at all except for morphing her fingernails into claws. She still manages to take out the giant tiger without even breaking a sweat.
When he sees that, Finn knows he has to have Charlie on his football team. She doesn’t even know the rules of the game, but when the coach sees how easily Charlie handles the giant bears she’s supposed to stop from moving down the field, she agrees Charlie has to join their team. So, now it looks like they’ve officially become a family of athletes.
Their next problem arises when it turns out the Yuns aren’t as keen as they thought to let it go after Charlie killed their daughter. They had promised not to go after the MacKilligan sisters, but Nat is not legally a MacKilligan. Her mom had given her another last name when she was born, so when Nat goes missing, it doesn’t take Charlie long to figure out who’s responsible or where they went.
So they go to rescue Nat, who of course needs no rescuing. She had been drinking vodka mixed with snake venom the night before, and her body doesn’t process snake venom. It just sits in her system and she can release it through her skin or even spit it out her mouth exactly like a cobra.
Once they realize that, the MacKilligan sisters realize Nat needs to move in with them because there’s no way her mom is prepared to deal with this.