Blaze of Memory, by Nalini SIngh

[rachelmanija]

Oh, Nalini Singh, you are so fond of horrendous gender roles and controlling alpha males controlling women and clichéd descriptions and the word “possessive” as the ultimate accolade for a man, and yet I can’t seem to quit you. Especially when I need something light to read on a plane, which is where I read this one.

In this book, the seventh in the Psy-Changeling series though all the ones I’ve read stand on their own, Singh is obsessed with the hero’s smell. This would make more sense if the heroine was a shapeshifter and had a wolf’s nose (I mean, when she shifts), but no, she’s a Psy. I don’t have the book with me, but from memory, Dev Santos smells like heat, cinnamon, steel, and an exotic wind of Asia, and also urgently male, unstoppably male, and relentlessly male. And a lot more things I forget. Many of them male.

Dev has the usual gem-colored or metallic eyes: Those eyes, the ones looking back at her, they were brown, but it was a brown unlike any she’d ever seen. There was gold in there. Flecks of amber. And bronze. So many colors.

There’s an accidentally hilarious line in there somewhere which I hope someone with the book will dig up and quote, but it goes something like, “His cock was harder than it had ever been. If she touched it, it would snap.” OW.

Dev Santos is a man who can control metal. Katya Haas is a telepathic amnesiac assassin sent to kill him. Together, they… hang out, fall in love, have sex, have more sex, angst, have more sex, and oh-yeah-that-assassin-thing-quick-get-in-an-action-sequence!

I wanted more assassinating and action and metal-controlling and worldbuilding, as those parts were really good. Though I enjoyed reading all the hanging out and angsting, and Dev (who is part Indian and speaks Hindi) is less of a jerk than most of Singh’s heroes. Unfortunately Katya does very little assassinating and spends most of the conclusion of the book dying from PsyNet deprivation (same as the heroine of some other Singh book, come to think of it.)

Not terribly good and surprisingly little happens for the first two-thirds, and yet I read the whole thing. If you haven’t yet encountered the evilly addictive Nalini Singh, this is a reasonable place to start.

Blaze of Memory (Psy-Changelings, Book 7)

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I was wondering if the metal thing about the eyes had to do with his superpower of controlling metal.

I liked this one, too, though I liked it a little less when the angst scaled back.

[seajules]

Too much boyfriend, not enough roller-derby assassinating?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

[seajules]

I hate when that happens.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

SADLY I cannot search inside that book on Amazon.com and so cannot find that phrase.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Does the heroine shoot the hero? Because that was the best part of Angels Make Vampires. I'm still saddened that it wasn't fatal.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

She nails him with a tranquilizer gun, but that turns out to be part of a mutually concocted plan.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen?

[larryhammer]

If she touched it, it would snap.

But not, apparently, crackle or pop?

---L.

[snarp]

I fired Nalini Singh shortly after the werewolf woman spent the whole book getting rescued and haircuts. I had been waiting for there to be a book about a werewolf woman! I had just believed that it was an unspoken rule that if a person has claws, they have to claw somebody!

[(Anonymous)]

“His cock was harder than it had ever been. If she touched ”

... a revolving LP record with it, music would emanate from his nearest body aperture. Remorselessly male music.