Cat's Books: Romance

 Born a slave, Mercury is an Arena Dog, genetically engineered to fight and die in the Arena for the entertainment of others. Trained as a gladiator from boyhood in a violent world, where men must form alliances and share what little bounty they have to survive, his only goal has been to keep his men alive. But two are dead and the rest are condemned to be hunted down and killed for sport. Worse, their demise will leave a woman Mercury has sworn to protect, alone and vulnerable. And then there is Samantha—a courageous human he has no right to claim. But she is his. He feels it deep in his soul and with an ache in his body he can’t deny.

Samantha Devlin is an indie-freight pilot who has lost everything: her ship, her crew, and her father. When an old friend hires her as an emergency replacement to pilot a cargo carrier for the Roma Company, she’s shocked to learn her cargo is three, living, breathing, and dangerously sexy Arena Dogs. When Samantha learns she’s taking the men to their deaths, she must decide if she is willing to risking everything for a man whose customs require that he share her with one of his men and demands he return to Roma to protect another woman. Mercury, their leader, and Lo, his emotionally broken arena-brother, challenge all her notions of honor, loyalty, and love. Her heart tells her Mercury is worth any cost, but her head sees nothing ahead but disaster.

 Review

I stayed up way too late last night finishing this book. Yea! Book drunk!

The writing is crisp and the characters have all little details that make them real. We get a complex science fiction universe that I can't wait to keep exploring.

The heroine is moral and brave. The hero is the same. They are both shaped by their pasts in away that makes them nuanced. There is a secondary romance that blooms because of the polygamous nature of the hero's culture that is very well done.

It is a sexy book with lots of action and plot twists. The heroine is a little slow on the uptake with a few things that I would have liked to see her work out before they became critical rather than after and there is the near rape that occurs in many books of this genre but overall so good.

Waiting impatiently for the next book in the series. Hurry!