Dirk & Steele agent Artur Loginov is an empath who can sense a person's emotions and memories by touching them or an object they have touched. He is a very damaged man with a dark, ugly past as a former member of the Russian mob and is now using his talents to help rather than harm others.

Elena is a psychic healer who can get inside the minds of injured or sick patients to help them use their own mental powers to heal themselves.

Both Elena and Arthur come to the attention of an evil organization called The Consortium that intends to use people with these special skills for their own dastardly purposes. So Elena and Arthur are drugged and kidnapped (separately) and taken to an underground prison to be brainwashed into using their skills for evil.

The story was riveting and I finished it in one sitting. I'm a bit squeamish about blood and torture and I didn't care for some of the torture that was described. I also thought the prison scenes which went on until about the midway point took up too much of the book. During this time the reader doesn't knows were they are being held and I kept wondering 'where the hell are they?' And the identity of their jailers was also kept from the reader. All was revealed very slowly and made for a captivating and sometimes frustrating read. Artur and Elena meet in the hallway of their prison and make a psychic connection. Eventually they escape together with the help of some shapeshifters and that's when the action intensifies. Unfortunately, the suspense and intrigue overwhelm the romance which took a back burner, but it was still enjoyable with some hot sexual tension and steamy love scenes. (Grade: B) ( )

Tasty tasty crackastic angst, just the thing for reading at 3 a.m. when RL sucks.

This is probably a better place to start the series than Tiger Eye. There's the beginning of a plot arc here which makes the first book feel more like a prologue, and Liu does a better job of integrating the hero/heroine with the broader universe she's establishing. A fun read, and also one with, like, 100% less tiger penis fellatio (see Tiger Eye. Or not.) That's always a bonus. ( )

http://rivkat.livejournal.com/222411.... ( )