Gloria's Pages

Maybe it's just that it's been so long since I read the other books in the series that I forgot a few important details, but I just didn't click with this book.

Joe is mourning the death of his wife and unborn son when he is told by his best friend/former lover Nick that they were actually murdered (according to information from the last book). They find out whodunit and ... stuff happens. I dunno, it doesn't really make an impression on me.

A few problems I have with this book.

1. Joe acts like a total ass the entire book. I get that he's mourning for his wife and kid and wants revenge, but he's not thinking and he's lashing out at the wrong people (ie Nick). And Nick just takes it for some goddamned reason.

2. In previous books a big deal is made about bounding (or imprinting or whatever it's called). Nick had bonded with a young wolf named Mark who was highly traumatized after the kidnapping and murder of his sister. It was supposed to be this intense father/son type relationship, and I was looking forward to seeing it in this book. So what happens? Mark moves out almost as soon as he's introduced in this book and is largely off-screen for the entirety of the novel. He finds love with one of the wolves who had been trapped in wolf form and manages to get him to shift back to human. That sounds like an awesome story that I would have loved to read so of course it happens largely off-screen. How disappointing.

3. Joe is so consumed with rage, and Nick is so consumed with Joe's issues, that they do very little actual investigating. There's basically two scenes where they do stuff, when they bring Mara's prenatal vitamins to get analyzed and when they go to the Senator's house to steal information (which turned out to be largely useless). Pretty much everything else is done by Rob, Jaime, or Sam, and usually off-screen.

4. I did not understand the problem Joe had in the waiting room. Supposedly society as a whole was keeping the wolves from acting like wolves and this caused a mental breakdown? Or something? If that was the problem why didn't Doug or Rob take Joe out to a park to change safely? There are big parks apparently all over the place for wolves to run around in. I get that society as a whole was somehow forcing wolves to act like humans, but that didn't make a big impact on the actual story. We're told that, not shown it, and it makes it hard to understand why things are wrong and what needs to change.

5. And speaking told but not shown, the villain. Sooo he had good intentions, but misunderstood the problem and was trying to fix it the wrong way? What. The. Fuck. It would have been nice to SEE him doing that, instead of telling us after the fact. And actually, his story sounded a lot more interesting than what we got! Why couldn't we had gotten his story? That would have been awesome.

So yeah, I was pretty disappointed by this novel. I expected better from this author, and I didn't get it.