After three amazing books in this series, what a disappointment!
So if you’ve been reading this series, you know the setup. The Sin brothers were created in a lab to be raised as soldiers. They have special abilities. They kick ass. They escaped five years ago and ever since then have been searching for a way to disable the kill chips embedded near their spines. They’ve been searching frantically for three books now and the clock is ticking.
SEVEN DAYS TO GO…
Jory is in a cell. Piper is a computer hacker trying to disable his kill chip. Why is it so much trouble? Apparently, when he was shot, one of the bullets nicked the chip and now it won’t respond to wireless communications. Great start!
But it didn’t take long at all for the problems to begin. Most notably, the chemistry between Jory and Piper was way off. In the other three books I felt it right away, but for these two it simply wasn’t working. Part of this might have been situational. Jory was locked in a cell, using “psychological tricks” to get Piper’s cooperation. (I put that in quotes because I wasn’t convinced by them.) Piper, meanwhile, was convinced Jory was a traitor to her country AND at the same time she was desperate to gain the love and respect of her father — the commander.
TIMING
The biggest problem with this book was timing. With seven days left to live, I felt that the tone of the book was not nearly immediate enough. It got worse when we started counting down the hours. They kept talking when it was time to act, and having sex when it was time to act… and I couldn’t get into it.
The timing was off in another sense too. Piper had to choose between her father and Jory in this book, something that could have been a terrific conflict in another situation but here I struggled with it. She spent the first half of the book waffling, during which time I had trouble buying any romantic attraction on her part. She just wasn’t in the right place, emotionally speaking. I think this is a big reason that the chemistry was off, and the reason why she rubbed me the wrong way. She wasn’t unlikeable, exactly, she just didn’t seem like the right girl for Jory at the right time.
The attraction between these two was so poorly timed that I skipped the sex scenes!
OTHER PROBLEMS
There was a plot twist late in the book that I found both implausible and utterly unnecessary. It never went anywhere.
Piper had a boyfriend at the start of this book who turned out to be a distraction in a book where there was already too much being packed in a short space of time.
The sappiness in this volume got to me more than in the other books. Not sure if there was more of it or if it came down to another timing problem — ie “Will you shut up about how much you love one another already and work on not dying?”
REDEEMING QUALITIES
There was another plot twist relatively early on that I loved and that could paves the way for more books in this world. This was probably the #1 thing that kept me reading to the end.
CONCLUSION
I’m not giving up on this author. Despite the rocky conclusion, this series remains an excellent example of steamy military suspense and I would totally recommend it. Prolific authors are bound to have a dud now and again. Plus, it’s always possible that the chemistry issues between Jory and Piper were my own problem. (I did my best to explain them so you could decide if they’ll be a problem for you.)