Saw this at B&N -- I've bolded my main point of concern:

Publishers Weekly

Wards's terrific latest picks up the Black Dagger Brotherhood of vampires where Lover Unboundleft off. Phury, a sworn Brother who has also become the Primale, is wrestling with a destiny he doesn't want, an addiction he can't handle and an insurmountable feeling of inadequacy that bleeds over into his love for Cormia, his Chosen First Mate. He holes up at the Brotherhood's rural New York base. The Omega, bent on destroying the vampire race, is meanwhile growing ever stronger, and his long-held plan to destroy the Brothers, via the Lessening Society, is coming to fruition. Younger Brotherhood trainees John Matthew, Qhuinn and Blaylock are learning what it means to come of age and are immersed in their own drama with Qhuinn's malicious cousin, Lash. The stories all reach a shared climax, leading to explosive revelations that set up the next book beautifully. Focusing less on Phury and Cormia and more on the Omega's plot amps the tension on all sides. A subplot involving Rhevenge, John Matthew and the female symphath Xhex is particularly exciting, with Ward diving into varied subspecies, sexual predilections and questions of identity. Ward has outdone herself with this latest Brotherhood novel. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I really don't like the sound of that -- the main couple taking a backseat to the, let's face it, boring and cartoonish Omega? I may skip this one and call myself "ovah da Brothas" after all. 

Signet, paranormal romance/urban fantasy, September 2007
Connections to: book 5 of the Black Dagger Brotherhood series

Why am I so addicted to this series? Honestly, I’ll read one book, and it’ll drive me insane with all its faux hip-hop culture, name-dropping, and bizarre vocabulary, and yet, when the next book comes out, there I am all over again. Lover Unbound was no different. I read the excerpt in the back of the last book, and thought "Ye gods, I’m going to skip this one." And I did hold out – for all of a month. I couched it as an experiment. This time, I was going to keep track of all those words whose usage drives me nuts – and I justified doing it with a new book because I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to re-read an older one. Yeah, right – that was just my addiction doing a little rationalizing.

Anyway, center stage in this book belongs to Vishous, the Brother who’s an IT genius, has visions of the future, a freaky glowing hand that somehow helps Butch vaporize lessers without sending them back to the Omega to fight another day, and, oh yeah, is a Dom who’s been harboring fantasies about his best friend Butch. One night, V gets shot after wasting a lesser, and because he was on his own, gets taken to a human hospital before any of the Brothers can find him. He fixates on his doctor, trauma surgeon Jane Whitcomb, and when the team arrives to extract him and wipe his existence from the hospital’s files and the memories of its workers, he insists that Jane be brought back to the compound. She’s his destined mate, you see. As for Jane, no matter how many times she mutters "Stockholm syndrome" to herself, she still falls for V in the course of a couple of days. But how can a human and a Brother make it work, especially when V is slated to become the Primale, the warrior who spiritually marries all of the Scribe Virgin's handmaidens for the sole purpose of procreation? Of course, the Scribe Virgin will go all deus ex machina on their asses, but the form it takes is unusual.

V’s backstory is an interesting one, and Ms. Ward finally clears up (or tries to) all the homoerotic elements about his relationship with Butch. On the surface, the argument makes sense to someone who really, really, really wants to deny the homoeroticism in this series, but frankly, that still doesn’t explain the scene in Lover Awakened when V, Butch, and Phury get freaky solo but together in the same bed. What makes even less sense is the sudden change in his Dom/Sub preferences. I’m not saying that a person can’t switch orientation or roles, but especially in the latter, if said person has been consistently one, for them to change to the other with all the ease of a light switch being flipped? Maybe it’s happened, but it doesn’t ring true for me.

This book is more than just V and Jane. Also on deck is John, the mute pretransition vampire who’s probably the reincarnation of Darius, or at the very least, the son of Darius. John goes through his transition (finally) to the tune of a ton of angst over missing Tohrment and Wellsie. Phury gets a great deal of attention in this book too – he’s angsting about loving his twin’s wife, resenting his virginity, and gaining an understanding of why Zsadist used to crave physical pain so much. I have to say that sometimes, I was happier to be reading about these two than about V and Jane, especially after the tepid and anticlimactic ending they were handed.

Now, back to my little test. I took some of the commonly used terms in this series and counted how many times they were used in this book, just for shits and giggles. I only took the terms that are actual words in the real world – though I must say that there was a marked (and welcome) decrease in the made-up words this time around. Here are my figures:

*MALE: 106 times
*FEMALE: 89 times
*TRUE (as in "true dat"): 12 times
*FEEL (as in “feel me?”): 10 times
*MY BROTHER: 9 times
*BRAND NAMES (of any sort): 36 times

So some words weren’t used as much as I thought they would be, and some I suppose are necessary (calling a vampire a male instead of a man to show the difference, yeah, I get it), but they can still get old. And I have to say this: I find it extremely odd that EVERYONE talks the same. OK, I can see the Brothers having the same speech/thought patterns, and I can see the pretrans/new vampires sharing that language, but Jane and her boss, Manny (about which there was some incredibly clunky hints as to sequel fodder) also talk and think the same way. Is Caldwell, NY, some kind of weird bespelled town, where everyone there is a hip-hop wannabe, just like everyone in Eureka is a certified genius of some sort? Oh yeah, except for the Chosen. They talk like Yoda, for some weird reason.

I nitpicked a lot in Lover Unbound, but thanks to all the tidbits about Phury, I’ll still read the next book. Dammit.

Review © 2007 by Riley Merrick

WARNING: This review contains SPOILERS. Big ones.

I saht dhown to rhead the lhatest ehntry in the BDB serhies lhast Sundhay, in the comfhey confhines of my sunphorch, a glhass of Ghrey Ghoose at my syde...

No, really, I did. But if I keep typing like that I'm going to give my spell-checker apoplexy. I don't know how Ward does it. OK, she probably does it by entering all her bizarre spellings into a custom dictionary, but still, the typing of them would drive me insane. OK, maybe she has autotype on her favorite whords. Anyway, my point is, the deliberate mis-spellings are legion and vomit-inducing. The newest offender, besides Butch's new name (which almost makes sense)? Xhex. You read that right. Xhex. A female vampire...or at least she's biologically female, b/c in every scene she's in, something about her is described as mannish -- but we'll get to that later.

Here we have Butch O'Neal, the only human allowed in the big, bad world of the vampires. Butch doesn't really belong, b/c he's human, so he can't fight. He knows too much, so he can't leave, either. He also can't be a fit mate for the one woman he can't forget: Marissa, a vampire aristocrat. He has never belonged -- he was an outcast in his own family growing up, and he never felt a part of the team on the police force either. But the added pressure is getting to him. And then he gets taken by lessers, where he gets treated to a visit from the Omega himself, who does something to him and then sets him free, hoping he'll be a Trojan horse with a direct line to the Brotherhood.

Vishous, Butch's roommate, a vampire who has kinky sex and decidedly confuzzled feelings about his relationship with Butch, uses his freaky-deaky glowing hand to banish the darkness from Butch. And calls in Marissa to keep an eye on him. Which apparently involves scorching hot foreplay and brings out almost vampire-like instincts in Butch. Now not only can he throw a bonding scent like a vampire, he can also sense and literally absorb lessers, barring their normal route back to the Omega.

So what does all this mean? Ward weaves a complicated tale here, but I give her credit, she leaves no dangling threads other than those which are clearly going to be answered in future books.

So what worked for me, and what didn't? I'm going to start with what didn't, since I pretty much already have, with the spellings and names.

In addition to those, the name-dropping drives me nuts. Grey Goose vodka. Lagavulin Scotch. Ferragamo shoes. Patek Phillipe watches. YSL gowns. What is Ward hoping for? Swag? Some form of advertising contract? Years ago, we had these books called Murder Ink that talked about pretty much every mystery/thriller series there was in existence, from Poe and Conan Doyle to Sayers and Christie. In the section on Bond Girls, it talked about how Bond spoke "label." As an example, they had Bond not understanding a woman who said she spilled the vodka when she bumped the glass in reaching for an ashtray...until she said something like, "I was reaching for the ashtray to tap out my Habanos when I knocked over the Baccarat glass and spilled the Stoli." That's exactly what all the name-dropping in this series reminds me of -- and this book has to be the worst of the lot.

The faux hip-hop culture of the Brothers is jarring and strange, period. I still can't buy the idea of whiteboy gangstas without thinking of Jamie Kennedy in Malibu's Most Wanted. I get the idea that Ward wants to show just how badass the Brothers are, how they're so thuggish they're both feared and revered by their own kind, but still, I GET IT ALREADY! Stop smacking me in the face with it over and over and over. I will grant her that as metaphors, the contrast between the Brothers' hip-hop and the glymera's Regency-like culture does work. (and you thought this whole review was going to be one long rant!) But still, one more "you feel me?" and despite the plot, the book would end up hurled across the room with great force.

The women. I realize that to this point, vampire society is a bit backward. Despite the tremendous power that even the females can wield, females are wrapped up in cotton wool, given pats on the head and told to wait in a safe place while the menfolk deal with the bad guys. The way Marissa takes charge of her own life gives me hope that a change is in the air. However, what really bothered me about the women in this series is that so far, the one woman who IS a fighter, the newly introduced and cringingly named Xhex, is described as mannish and hermaphroditic -- in fact, when she propositions Butch, he even asks her if she's 100% female "down there." Why can't women be feminine AND kick-ass, huh?

The deus ex machina of the Scribe Virgin swooping in at the last minute and banishing the Omega. What I would have preferred to see here is Butch and V using their newly found and prophesized powers of Destroyer and Savior to banish him. Having the SV popping up all the time is a cop-out, IMO.

OK, so what worked for me?

Butch and Marissa. I honestly didn't think they would. Marissa never appealed to me before in the series, because she was so weak. Having her stand up to Havers and finally reach out for the man she wanted redeemed her for me. Butch was always the sidekick with the annoying obsession for designer stuff. In this book, though, it was clear that two outsiders found a way to become insiders, and that was fabulous.

Butch and V. Anyone who says there was no homoerotic element to this series, and particularly to this book, is completely and willfully blind. Butch and V are way more than platonic friends, but something less than lovers. The desire to cross that line and test the waters is clearly there, though, from the moment V saw Butch and Marissa in the clinic's quarantine room to the embrace during Butch's initiation ceremony.

Mr. X and the lesser prophecy. This time, the bad guys weren't just these weird baby-powder-smelling albinos who popped up, kidnapped a civilian, and then got dispatched by the Brothers. There was ulterior motive, and depth. I liked it.

The idea that Butch is of Wrath's bloodline. Who is his father? I'm definitely interested in this one.

John. Although I wondered if his storyline was exactly essential to the book, it did present with some intriguing notions. Why did he seize up when he remembered the explosion that killed Darius? Is he Darius reincarnated or something?

The hawt secks. Yes, I'm shallow enough to admit it. I like to read sex scenes. I really liked the buildup-and-stop thing Ward had going on with Butch and Marissa, probably b/c the foreplay was really hawt. The only ding here is that it seemed like the foreplay pages went on forever, but when they did finally consummate, and every sex scene after that, it seemed a little short-changed. But still, A+ for heat.

I loved this book. But do I feel good about loving it? Not really. I feel almost guilty for being able to forget all the awfulness of the names and the spellings. Like my friend Grrrly said, it's "mental crack" -- bad for me, but I can't seem to stop. The inclusion of an excerpt from V's upcoming book, Lover Unbound, seems to prove that. I'm a wee bit disappointed that it appears V's chosen is a human woman, since, given his proclivities, I was rather thinking he'd have fun playing eternal slap 'n tickle with Xhex, but I'll still be reading it. See? Mental crack.

I do have to say, one thing in terms of naming that really does work for me in this series is the titles. Think about it. Dark Lover: Wrath is blind. Lover Eternal: Rhage chooses to keep his curse forever and Mary gets to live forever with him. Lover Awakened: Z breaks his long fast. Lover Revealed: Butch is revealed as the fulfillment of a prophecy. And finally, Lover Unbound: V is into bondage. Rather fitting, they are.

I hate myself for loving this series, but I do love it. It rates an 8 on the guilt-o-meter, so it's a dirty love. Make that dhirhty.

Review ©2007 by Riley Merrick

Signet Eclipse, paranormal, September 2006
Connections to: third book in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series

Lover Awakened brings readers back to the super-cool world of the vampire warriors with the super-stupid names and inexplicable gangsta rap listening habits. I'm not sure if it's good or bad that the names didn't drive me insane this time. I'm still not nuts about them, but my annoyance with them is superseded by the silly vampire vocabulary of misspelled human words—cohntest, sehclusion...AUGH. Give me strength.

That's not to say I didn't love this book, because I did, against all odds. Zsadist has always been the most obviously wounded Brother, and I have been eagerly awaiting his and Bella's story.

At the story's opening, Bella is still being held captive by the lesser known as Mr. O (a seriously non-team player who is sickly obsessed with Bella). Her family has given her up for dead—she even found out through a fellow captive that they had her Shade ceremony. The Brotherhood has officially stopped searching for her—all except for Z, and to some extent, his twin Phury. Bella is left playing mind games with Mr. O that make her feel as twisted as he is. When a civilian vampire escapes with Bella's help, he is able to send the Brotherhood to her rescue.

Once safe with the Brotherhood, Bella sticks as close to Z as he will allow, which isn't saying much. Her proximity is bringing all of Z's issues from his past as a blood slave to the fore, all the reasons why he's more animal than person. But the thing is, he perversely wants Bella close, despite feeling unworthy of her. He does get a little too "I'm not worthy" for my taste, but fortunately, Bella sees right through all his tactics to push her away. If the heroines in Dark Lover and Lover Eternal seemed a little weak, Bella more than makes up for them. She rocks.

There is a whole mess of stuff going down against the Bella-and-Z-angst backdrop: Phury's guilt over his own life of privilege compared with his twin's suffering, not to mention his own attraction to Bella, John's bloodline tests, training, first crush, and emotional demons, the attempted restoration of some of the ancient vampire community ceremonies, Bella's mysterious brother and what his powers mean for the Brotherhood, and a power struggle among the lesser (just to name a few!). With so much going on, you'd think there would be a plot hole or skipped beat, but Ms. Ward weaves this myriad of threads together absolutely flawlessly, and I can't help but be impressed.

I was very pleased to see that the Scribe Virgin wasn't trotted out in this book as a deus ex machina, that the characters resolved their issues on their own, with no godly intervention (of course, the fact that both are full-blooded vampires probably contributed—I fully expect to see the SV again in Butch's story).

One of my friends and I (the same one with whom I talked about the SV last time) have a running joke going on about the Brothers. It all started with us noticing that Wrath's goolies are clean-shaven, and wondering how a blind vampire shaves down there, and escalated into a hysterically funny (to us, at least) scenario involving the Brothers all shaving each other to hip-hop music in a locker room. Hee. That image still cracks me up. Anyway, my point is the series is ripe with homoerotic subtext, what with Butch. Phury, and Vishous landing in bed together during the frenzy induced by Bella's needing (incidentally, why didn’t "needing" merit a special vampire misspelling?! Why isn't it "needhing" or something?!), the strange reaction Butch had to V's forcing him to drink his blood, and all the "Is Phury gay?" joking remarks flying around. Now, I've been reading on various blogs and boards that there is a faction among Ms. Ward's fans who are so fiercely defensive of her work that they are in denial about this subtext. But c'mon, people! Straight guys naked in bed together, drinking, smoking, and jacking off? Seriously? And by the way, my noticing this does not in any way make me homophobic (as apparently the more rabid of the fangirls are screaming). I think it's hysterically funny, and in some ways, smokin' hot too. If that makes me sick, I'm not looking for a cure. Heh.

Anyway, the chemistry (whether between Bella and Z or anyone else!) was sizzling, the story was suspenseful and seamless, the cliffhangers totally jaw-dropping, and I can't wait for Butch's story...and Phury's...and V's...and Tohr's...

Review ©2006 by Riley Merrick

Penguin, paranormal romance, March 2006
Connections to: second novel in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series

If someone had bet me that I would love a new vampire series which boasts characters with utterly ridiculous names like Wrath, Rhage, Tohrment, Phury, and Zsadist (man, my spell-checker is having a field day right now!) and had garnered favorable comparisons to Christine Feehan's Carpathian books, I would have laughed, taken the bet...and lost.

After an adjustment period, mainly to cope with the names (oh gods, the names!), Dark Lover grabbed me by the throat and didn't let go. Lover Eternal sucked me right in, stupid names and all. I will caution interested readers: you must read Dark Lover first, or you will be helplessly lost.

Lover Eternal is Rhage's story. Hollywood handsome on the outside, Rhage has a beast within—literally. He was cursed with it for centuries, as a punishment from the Scribe Virgin, the vampire race's creator. Since great emotions and dangerous situations tend to bring out the beast, he tries to keep it sated with a constant stream of sex and hunting lesser, the creatures bent on destroying the vampire race.

Mary is brought to the Brotherhood's headquarters as an interpreter for a mute pre-transitional vampire youth who seems destined to join the warrior class (and get his own book, I suspect). A post-beast-release Rhage encounters Mary in a hallway and is enthralled by her voice. Rhage knows he can't get involved with a human beyond one-night stands. For one thing, it’s generally forbidden in his culture, and for another, he's terrified that his beast will harm anyone who gets too close.

But he can't stay away from her, and once a cadre of lesser comes after her for being seen with him, he takes her under his protection, amidst the protests of the other Brothers. Mary's only saving grace in the eyes of the other Brothers is that she's terminally ill, so she's not going to be around long enough to do their people any harm. And by the time Rhage appeals to the Scribe Virgin for Mary's life, the Brothers have accepted her and her loyalty.

****SPOILER WARNING****

( Read more... )

Despite the names, this is still my favorite new series. I love the set-up, the pacing, the characters, the steam and chemistry, and the interaction between the Brothers. I can't wait for the release of Lover Awakened later this year.

Review ©2006 by Riley Merrick