Shield of Winter
Psy-Changeling, Book #13
By Nalini Singh
ISBN# 9780425264010
Author’s Website: http://www.nalinisingh.com/
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Heidi
Vasic has been tortured, I mean trained, since he was a child. His teleporting ability was highly coveted making him a prime candidate for the Arrows, but even as a child he fought it with all his might leading to more punishing training methods to be doled out.
Forced to live in a world during the Silence Protocol, Vasic has learned not to feel. He’s a well-trained machine and nothing more. Now that Silence has fallen and he sees that others around him have found love and a life, Judd and even Kaleb Krychek, but he knows that he never will. He’s waiting out his final days on this earth and is ready to embrace death with open arms. His risky move to have the experimental biofusion gauntlet put in his arm has proven to be a mistake; it’s malfunctioning and Vasic is running out of time. He’s fine with that until he finds something worth living for.
Now that Silence has fallen Kaleb Krychek is starting to awaken the empaths. The PsyNet is being taken over by disease and he feels that the empaths being removed from society is the cause. Wake the empaths, restore balance and stabilize the net, well it’s a nice theory anyway.
Ivy Jane is one of those empaths being awoken. She’s been made to believe her whole life that she has no power and that her Silence has always been broken, causing her to have gone through a massive rehabilitation when she was younger. Imagine her surprise to learn she is a powerful empath. Now she’s taken on the responsibility to find a way to save their race, but with no empaths to teach her how, she and the others will have to feel their way through it and discover what to do on their own. But they are quickly running out of time.
I love Nalini Singh and I love this series. But sadly this book paled in comparison to its predecessor, Heart of Obsidian. This book is exactly what I had expected when I read Heart of Obsidian, but that time I was pleasantly surprised when it became my favorite of the series. But Shield of Winter just wasn’t a book for me. It was your typical Psy on Psy relationship, which I’ve never been a big fan of.
I wanted to like Vasic and Ivy, but sadly I found them to be a bit on the dull side. Maybe because this book didn’t really focus a lot on their relationship. There was so much going on with the epidemic in the net and how to fix it that it really took over the whole book. And, honestly I really didn’t care about that! And surprisingly this couple didn’t get intimate until the last 3rd or so of the book. But it did lead to my favorite part of the book, when Vasic enlisted Judd’s help with his little intimacy problem!
“How do you control your telekinesis while intimate with your mate?”
“I broke a damn lot of furniture at the start, including two beds.” A curious glance. “What are you doing?”
“Traveling around the world.”
We saw several other couples from the series in this book, Sascha and Lucas and Kaleb and Sahara to name a few! I’m really surprised that Singh didn’t use more intimate scenes between these couples to offset the lack of sex between the main couple. Maybe it would have helped me wait it out a little better!
I definitely think any Psy-Changeling fan should read this book, I just didn’t find it all that exciting, but I hope that others can find more enjoyment in it than I did. I am a picky reader after all …
