Lover Mine

Lover Mine has John looking for Xhex who was captured by Lash. John is "seeing" bits of his past life. Payne is majorly injured in one of her fighting practices with Wrath and is brought over to his side. Blay's and Qhuinn's relationship gets tested and changes. All in all a good book but it is getting some what predictable.

You can get the facts of what happens from lots of sources - this is the John Matthew/Xhex store and is very well done. Ward doesn't hesitate to have really bad things happen to her protagonists and deal with the consequences, and some of her exploration of kink goes considerably beyond happy fluffy bunny tie him/her up with ribbons. (Not that there's anything wrong with vanilla kink that is purely symbolic.)

This does seem to me to have a higher than usual icky/goo/gore factor.

I only finally read the Ward books because so many people I trusted said that they were good reading once you got past male vampire characters with names like Rhage and Tohrment... (that's a pretty big "get past" I admit.)

I do think that Ward started writing these and set up an unsustainable construct in her worldbuilding and then managed to mostly pull it down around her characters heads (this is the whole "Scribe Virgin" afterlife religion that is set up in the early books and knocked sidewise.)

The trick is that she ends up getting you emotionally involved and caring about the fate and experiences of these tortured people (ok, vampires & people) that she writes about and rooting for them.

She also manages to write really over the top alpha male types and heroines who are genuinely either kickbutt or matches for them in other ways without triggering my "throw the book at the wall" reflex.

The pop culture style references to music/clothing etc get a little over the top, but again she makes it work for me. I don't think near immortal badasses listen to Pete Seger or the Carpenters...
( )

I was waiting for this love story a long time so the ending was just anti-climatic. Too ordinary somehow. Maybe the problem was that I expected that whole Darius/John connection to be resolved... I don't know. And reactions of other characters to the whole thing are just too weird. John gets seizures and starts twitching on the floor... reaction is - nothing. Everybody's cool. Just weird and not real. ( )

Originally posted at Once Upon a Chapter

My interst in this series has been heightened again because of Lover Mine. There are so many questions that I would like to have answered and so many happily ever afters I still want to see. I took my time reading this book so I could savor it. The writing is superb and flows well. New elements were added to the series, conflicts resolved and yet there are still things that hold my interest. I cannot wait for the next book. Lover Mine is an amazing story and Ward is such a talented author. I've heard several people say that after the last couple of books, they were giving up on the series. To those people, please read Lover Mine before you make that decision. In the end Lover Mine really adds to the continuing saga of the Black Dagger Brotherhood and will have a place on my keeper shelf. ( )

To me, the Black Dagger Brotherhood series is like a boyfriend you just can't quit. You know he's bad for you and he doesn't treat you right, and yet, you still keep coming back. I refer to this series as my book "crack", because I keep reading even as I know I should put the book down and go onto better things. However John Matthew and Xhex were two of my favorite characters from their introduction and to see their relationship finally grow into...well, something...is why I picked up this book.

I'll admit some of the other plot lines bored me. I could care less about Lash or the Lessors, and the couple in the hotel was boring in the very least. Yet, John Matthew, even though I knew how this was all going to end, was the character that kept me reading.

In spite of my issues with the world building, the vampires, the well...everything...J.R. Ward delivers a unique street-wise take on vampires and their society as well as characters with which you can empathize. The story kept me turning pages, and isn't that all we really ask out of our books? ( )