Series: Jessica McClain #1
Published by Orbit on September 11, 2012
Genres: Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy
Pages: 352
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Synopsis:Born the only female in an all male race, Jessica McClain isn’t just different—she’s feared.
After living under the radar for the last twenty-six years, Jessica is thrust unexpectedly into her first change, a full ten years late. She wakes up and finds she’s in the middle of a storm. Now that she’s become the only female full-blooded werewolf in town, the supernatural world is already clamoring to take a bite out of her and her new Pack must rise up and protect her.
But not everyone is on board. The werewolf Rights of Laws is missing text and the superstitious werewolves think that Jessica means an end to their race. It doesn’t help when Jessica begins to realize she’s more. She can change partway and hold her form, and speak directly to her wolf. But the biggest complication by far is that her alpha father can't control her like he can the rest of his wolves.
When a mercenary who’s been hired by the vampires shows up to extract information about the newly turned werewolf only days after her change, they find themselves smack in the middle of a war and there's no choice but to run together. When it’s up to Jessica to negotiate her release against her father’s direct orders, she chooses to take an offer for help instead. In exchange, Jessica must now swear an oath she may end up repaying with her life.
This book is filling the category “Been on TBR Forever” in my Full House Reading Challenge.
Here’s another middle of the road book for me. I enjoyed Full Blooded. This is the year of Urban Fantasy for me, it seems, and I was thrilled to read one in the werewolf division. But aside from, hey, this is an entertaining werewolf book, I don’t really have a lot to say about it.
In a world where female werewolves don’t exist, Jessica McClain is an anomaly. No one knows how she is a full blooded wolf, and there are plenty who believe she will fulfill a legend that prophesies destruction. Jessica just wants to live her normal life, as a P.I. for supernaturals. But when everybody wants you for their own nefarious reasons, life gets complicated pretty quick.
I thought Jessica was a good heroine: sassy but not stupid, seems to know what she’s doing, takes advice from those who are wiser than she…plus, she interacts with her wolf side in her head, and those moments were cute and fun. It was like having a very attentive dog following her around.
The pack of wolves that are closest to her, her brother, and her father (the Alpha) were fiercely loyal, and they seemed to have pretty solid characters that I’m sure we’ll get to see later on in the series. There wasn’t much time to get to know each of them, since everything was going to hell in a hand basket. Police Detective Ray Hart was a strange character for me; he obviously was trying to bust Jessica for drugs or something, and I secretly hope he becomes a member of the scooby gang later as they traipse through supernatural land.
Colin Rourke. I sort of read his description and pretended like I hadn’t because he sounded like a pro wrestler and that’s just not attractive to me, so I conjured a different image in my mind, especially as we got to know him (which, I’m a huge fan of his character btw and I’m DYING to know what his animal is – he’s a shifter, and everyone knows he’s a cat of some kind, but no one left alive has seen it).
Full Blooded is really action packed, though I thought the beginning was pretty slow. It’s full of world building though, explaining the packs and politics and such, so I guess it was necessary, but it just felt like it took a long time to get to the turning point in the middle where everything started happening at once. Then it flew. I wasn’t feeling super swoony about any of the romance either, though I enjoyed that part of the story, and I’m very interested to see how that progresses in the next book.
Good for fans of Urban Fantasy.