Brought to you by OBS reviewer Heidi

Max Shannon is a good cop, born with a natural shield, making him one of the best human cops around.  He is currently working on a case of a sociopathic killer.  He has his perp locked up, but now it’s up to him to find the locations where he buried the bodies so that he can bring them home to their families.  But, Max can’t do this alone and Justice-Psy, Sophia, is brought in to try to pull the information from the killer’s mind.

Shortly after Sophia and Max meet, they are both called to San Francisco on another case, to help Psy Councilor, Nikita Duncan, discover who is targeting and killing her associates and to determine if she has a mole in her organization.

J-Psys have a very short life expectancy considering all the horrors they are exposed to while sifting through the minds of others.  And, now Sophia has learned she is at the end of her own usefulness.  The next time she goes in for rehab will be her last, so she must do everything in her power to make her shields last as long as possible.  But she quickly realizes that her new partnership with sexy cop, Max, is not only awakening her body to new sensations, but accelerating the rate of her psychic decline.  But she is determined to experience life to it’s fullest before hers is snuffed out for good.

“Take care of my heart won’t you, Sophie? It’s a little odd having it outside my body–but I’m planning to steal yours to make up for it.” 

I really don’t know what to say about this book.  It’s the second Psy-Changeling book in a row that I’ve read that I really didn’t care for.  In Blaze of Memory (book 7), I just didn’t like the lead characters.  That is not the case in this book.  I didn’t dislike Max and Sophia….although I didn’t really love them either, but I did find myself enjoying the characters by the end of the story.  I liked Max from the beginning, but I couldn’t connect with Sophia and I just didn’t get the relationship at all….especially with all this running hot and cold stuff with her wanting to be with him sexually and him stopping it.  I understand it was supposed to be a show of sensitivity and how he doesn’t want to harm her, but I found it got old rather quickly.  You can only read the same basic gesture so many times before it gets completely dull.  Ultimately, I couldn’t connect with Max and Sophia as a couple throughout the majority of the book and I found myself having a hard time focusing on the story and even having to force myself to keep going back to it to finish reading it.  Which is really strange for a Nalini Singh book, which I usually gobble up as quickly as I can.  Color me disappointed with this installment.

We did get more glimpses of the DarkRiver pack, which was nice.  I love seeing Lucas being so protective of Sascha and their unborn cub.  And, the few glimpses of Dorian, Clay, and Vaughn were enjoyable as well.  Outside of the pack, we also got to see that Nikita isn’t the ice queen that she always appears to be, at least underneath the surface.

I found my favorite part of this book, and one of the few things that I even liked at all, was the ending.  It was something I expected, but I really liked seeing come to fruitation.