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KH LeMoyne

Author of Betrayal's Shadow

12 Works 98 Members 10 Reviews

Series

Works by KH LeMoyne

Betrayal's Shadow (2011) 54 copies
Return of the Legacy (2011) 9 copies
Warrior Reborn (2011) 8 copies
Hidden (2014) 7 copies
Destiny's Mark (2012) 5 copies
Missing (2015) 3 copies
Honor's Quest 2 copies
Traitor (2017) 2 copies
Blood Oath 1 copy

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Reviews


I was given this book to read through Read 2 Review, thank you.

This story is told mostly from the point of view of Mia, the female protagonist, and Turen, the male protagonist.

This book was interesting in that it wasn’t just a love story between two people, but it was also a mystery with many other intriguing characters. It was a romance story, but much more. That in itself puts it above the usual romance fodder that is out there.



The beginning of this book was confusing. We jump into the story as Turen is being held prisoner, and he’s getting beat up. Until Mia first pops up into Turen’s cell, the story didn’t make sense to me. I had a difficult time figuring out what was going on, and couldn’t get pulled into the story, it appeared undefined and slow. I found the beginning awkward to read and I was hoping that it didn’t continue on the way it was. Luckily the story started to make more sense once Mia folded into Turen’s cell. Oh, and the word fold reminds me of the Guild Masters in Dune that folded space for their transport ships.

The author did a good job with dividing up the POV’s by chapter, or with paragraph separators. However, I did find a few instances where the POV change switched suddenly from paragraph to paragraph without warning. I needed to re-read what was happening in order to find out which person was currently speaking.

I liked that the author had Mia learning and training with her new abilities. Mia doesn’t all of a sudden turn into Superwoman; it was obvious Mia trained to do the things she did. Too many stories with female heroines don’t let a woman’s super abilities develop, they’re almost instantaneous. So I think the author did a good job with this aspect of Mia’s character.

I liked Mia, until she told Turen she was pregnant. Mia up to that point was intent on searching for answers and improving herself by learning fighting techniques. She was a smart woman that turned into a “fragile piece of china” once she told Turen she was pregnant, no matter how much she denied it. She got all dewy eyed and was no longer as spunky during the rest story of the story. Gone was the ‘warrior’ that Turen fell in love with and instead there was a person that was known for her ability to read the Archives and as Marcus’ mother and Turen’s mate. In Mia’s place for a strong female character came Breit, one of the guardians. It’s a shame the author turned Mia into a damsel in distress and had her pretty much fade into the background.

The conversations that Mia and Turen had in Turen’s prison cell were interesting. I liked the growing relationship between them, although I think it probably went on at least one scene too long. I was getting bored and wondered when they were going to escape.

Usually I don’t think het sex is very good in stories but the sex in this was pretty good. Although I did think it odd that it was sort of one sided. It was Turen doing all the sexy time stuff to Mia, which I don’t think is very interesting since women like to participate and do stuff ‘to’ men also. I would have enjoyed the sex scenes more if Mia actually did things to Turen other than running her fingers over his mark or just kissing him. So, yeah, the sex scenes could have been more equal.

I think the author could have been less obvious with the foreshadowing. It could have been more subtle and smoother.

For instance, there were a couple of events that happened in the book that I didn’t see a purpose for. The first was when Xavier shot Turen up with loads of drugs, specifically to make him lose his control. I can see that the author wanted to use this so that Turen would lose control around Mia and they’d then have hot sex, but it’s a poor ploy to lead up to the sex. It would have been better if there was a purpose to Xavier shooting Turen up with the drugs. There’s no interrogation, nothing, it’s just used to set up the sex scene. It’s like the author got lazy and didn’t want to bother to create a reason Xavier gave the drugs, or another way to get Turen and Mia to have sex.

The next event that happened that I found irrelevant, was when Turen saved Marco’s sister from being sold by Manny to his friends. The whole scene with staking out Manny’s house and rescuing the girl appears to have been a set up for later in the story when Turen uses his power of fire to save Mia and Marcus. I think that the Tucson scene could have been eliminated and instead, used the event when Turen found out about the scorch marks in the garage. He would train Mia there and explain about the fire then. The readers would learn about both of their fire abilities and the unnecessary scene with Marco’s sister could have been cut.

The author did a pretty good job pacing out the story to keep me interested, not to slow except for the beginning, too long in the prison, and saving the sister. I didn’t like that Mia faded into the background once she had the baby and her character turned into a pretty useless character. The people and scenes were easy to visualize. There wasn’t excessive flowery description and neither was the story lacking in description. I liked this book despite the few things I mentioned in the review. I give this book four stars.



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Penumbra1 | 2 other reviews | Oct 11, 2022 |
I received this book through The Nexus group for an honest review, thank you.



Destiny’s Mark is the third book in the series The Guardians of Eden. The Guardians of Eden are a race of super beings that live in a place called the ‘Sanctum’ in a place called ‘Eden.’ They exist to help human souls. Each Guardian has one mate for life and the series follows the Guardians as they gradually find their mates. This particular story centers on Tsu Halan the marital arts instructor of the Guardians. Disciplined, swift and deadly, he finds his mate in Jai Daskov a human who is half Chinese and half Russian. Unfortunately, getting his mate to fall in love with him is not an easy task. Jai has walled herself off from people in order to concentrate all her focus on finding her stolen daughter. Jai is unable to trust and so Tsu sets out to woo Jai and gives her all the room she needs to see what he has to offer. In return he gives her all the assistance he is able in tracking down her lost daughter.

I don’t want to disclose much about the plot of this story, but I didn’t find it as interesting as the second book or even as interesting as the first book in the series. However, I will say that the author’s writing ability has steadily improved from one book to the next. I didn’t find the rapid POV changes that were predominant in the second book and which drove me crazy. I think I only found two instances of inconsistent POV in this book and both lasted about two sentences.

For me the story was slow for the first half. It’s mostly about laying the groundwork for what happens in the rest of the story. I would have been happy to read more action but luckily it picked up during the second half.

I didn’t find the characters as interesting as in the first two books. Maybe because it was that both the MCs tended to be focused and internal rather than very interactive emotionally with others around them. This made it more difficult for me to connect with the two MCs. I did like Tsu more than Jai and found his scenes much more interesting. In fact I didn’t really care that much about Jai at all. It’s not that I wanted something bad to happen to her, she just didn’t matter.

The one character I very much liked was Sagari, the female Guardian who was part of Tsu’s team and trained with him. She was also very talented at covert operations. Sagari was spunky, bright, filled with laughter and livened up any scene she was in. I hope the author will write a book on Sagari and her search in finding a mate. Hopefully with Frank, the human who is the head of a very secret covert operations team. We were introduced a bit more to a few other Guardians. There is Quan, Tsu’s sister and Saladin, a Guardian who has the ability to use his voice to influence people. Quan seems to be in touch with her mate through dreams and nightmares and she is fearful of meeting him because he appears to be an evil man. I can definitely see a book written about Quan and her mate. I can also see a possible one for Saladin and Grimm, the Healer. This seems like a lot of books for a series, but I can tell you that I would gladly read them because the series is very entertaining and well written.

What I especially liked about this book was the author’s ability to connect subplots and scenes and references into each other as the story progresses. Everything mentioned had a relation to everything else that the author introduced. The author skillfully wove everything together and ended the book without feeling rushed. The other thing I really liked was the character development. Jai started out scared and unable to trust. With Tsu’s help and the help of the many people who searched for her daughter, Jai was able to heal and become more confident and to finally trust. Because she changed, she was then able to help Tsu with a secret pain that he had been carrying within himself since he was a child. The turnaround of their roles at the end was very satisfying. I very much enjoy character development and the author did a great job.

I give Destiny’s Mark 4 Stars. I would have given it more, but I found the first half of the story a bit slow going in terms of action and the story for this book was not as entertaining for me as the first two books. However it is still well worth the read. I’m looking forward to the future books in this series.


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Penumbra1 | 1 other review | Oct 11, 2022 |
I received this book from the author through The Nexus group here on Goodreads for an honest review, thank you.



Warrior Reborn is the second book in The Guardians of Eden series. This story centers on Briet, a healer among her people known as the Guardians. The Guardians are a race of beings created to safeguard mankind and they live in a Sanctum in a place called Eden. Each Guardian has one mate that they hope to find within their very long, almost immortal lifetime. After one hundred and fifty years, Briet finds her’s in the form of Jason Ballard, a man who watches over the cancer treatments and protocols for Briet’s young patients.

I think the author grew in her writing abilities when she created the MCs for this story. I enjoyed them much more than I did Turen and Mia in the first book. One of the reasons is because Briet remained strong-willed and independent throughout the story even though she fell in love with Jason. In the first story Betrayal’s Shadow, as soon as Mia fell in love and became pregnant, she turned into a damsel in distress and that ruined a lot of the first book for me. Here, the author did much better in keeping the lively spirit of Briet intact. I liked how the author created Briet to be a loving, caring person yet giving Jason space to face his past demons but also helping him to face them. The author walked a fine line in creating a personality in Briet that was an ideal female that molded to a male’s personality, but also retained her own independence and spirit. The author did much better with Briet than she did with Mia.

At first I didn’t care for Jason at all and agreed with Briet’s older brother, Angsgar, when he said this:

”Because you look like some playboy wannabe with a fast car, a hot job, and girls to spare.” Angsgar glared at Jason, his fisted hands at his side ready to draw a punch.

I found Jason to be an unlikeable character for almost half the book, but the author did a good job of showing that underneath Jason’s cool, playboy exterior there were glimpses of compassion he wouldn’t show anyone, but Briet broke through Jason’s walls. The breaking down of Jason’s walls took place at a believable pace. There would usually be an event that pushed Jason to take another step closer to Briet until he was ready to make a commitment.

The secondary characters were enjoyable and I hope that the author will write some stories about them in the future. I’d like to know if Grimm finds a mate, and it would be awesome if Jason’s brother Frank finds a mate among the Guardians. Frank seems like he would be a perfect fit to help the Guardians both within the Sanctum and out in the human world.

This brings me to the point of view changes. Warrior Reborn is told in third person mainly through the eyes of Briet and Jason. The author had two good ways of changing povs; one was with paragraph separators and the other through chapter changes. However, and this is a big however, for the first half of the book the author had another way of changing povs that I disliked immensely. There would be sudden pov changes between Briet and Jason within the middle of a conversation or scene. I felt as if I was getting whiplash. I’d be in one person’s mind and then swoosh, I’d suddenly find myself looking at the scene from the other character’s eyes. The pov changes left no mystery as to what the other characters were thinking or feeling. Everything was laid out or explained once we were in the other person’s head and the scene lost all suspense and became flat. I haven’t the foggiest idea why the author felt compelled to jump from head to head. The scenes would have easily worked by continuing in the original person’s viewpoint.

There are numerous grammatical errors such as missing words and transposed words.

The cancer treatments and Salvatore’s involvement with the research was a good mystery. It went over my head a bit but I consider that more me since I don’t really understand medical research. One interesting point was the development of Jason’s powers after he mated with Briet. The author went into nice detail with that. I also liked that the descriptions in the story were not overdone or flowery. There was just enough but not too much. The pace of the story was good and I don’t remember a point where it felt too slow.

The sex scenes between Jason and Briet were very good, much better than in the first book between Turen and Mia. In fact, I liked that in this story the sex was more shown through the male’s pov, whereas the first book was more through Mia’s. I normally read M/M and don’t find M/F sex all that interesting, there are only a couple authors that make it interesting enough for me to read but I was pleasantly surprised with the scenes in this book.

I give this story 4.5 stars because of the plot, the characterization and the author’s improved writing from the first book. However, because of the numerous grammatical errors and most of all the exceedingly annoying pov changes that appeared in the first half of the book, I’ll have to reduce the stars to 4.0. This is a good, unique series and I look forward to reading the books that follow.


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Penumbra1 | 2 other reviews | Oct 11, 2022 |

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Works
12
Members
98
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Rating
3.8
Reviews
10
ISBNs
10

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