I swear I won’t be going through audiobooks at such a ferocious pace all the time. This is just…happenstance. But yes, I’ve continued listening to Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series. Today I finished Archangel’s Storm, which from the cover alone indicates it’s time to delve into the depths of another of Raphael’s seven. In this case, Jason, the angel with night-black wings that seem to reflect no light.
On the Indian subcontinent, the archangel Neha rules, and she’s kind of pissed at Raphael (and Elena) for opposing and killing her daughter. Never mind that said daughter did heinous and horrendous things. A mother’s love is still a mother’s love. Anyway, Jason hears that Erras, Neha’s consort who hasn’t been seen in three hundred years, is dead. And Neha decides that Jason, the best spymaster in the cadre, is the one to solve this murder mystery.
Jason agrees for reasons of his own. Being in Neha’s court will allow him an opportunity to gather information he’d normally find difficult to acquire. And he’ll be able to learn about Mahiya, Neha’s niece. The princess is the daughter of Neha’s dead younger sister…and Erras. Yeah, there’s some family issues there.
Mahiya is a princess because Neha acknowledges their kinship. But while she has some privilege, it can be taken from her at the archangel’s whim, and she can be severely punished. Neha’s court is a prison, and she sees Jason as a means to escape.
This is still a paranormal romance, so it can’t possibly be a surprise how most things go down. But there’s some twists and turns to the plot that will have ramifications for the world as a whole.
But the best parts of Archangel’s Storm (and yes, the title does refer to Jason just as Dmitri is Raphael’s Blade), are the ones where we go back to Dmitri and Honor. Actually, this book opens just a few hours after Archangel’s Blade ends, with the two getting married. The synopsis is that Dmitri admits, at first just to himself, that he manipulated Honor into agreeing to become vampire. And she reaffirms her decision.
Since I don’t find Storm as compelling as Blade, it’s easy enough to see why those chapters are my favorites of this book. I have nothing against Jason or Mahiya. I just find Dmitri and Honor more interesting characters, hence why I started listening to that audiobook far more than I would normally. I doubt I’ll keep up that pace, but it’s impossible to say at the moment.
I am getting more than a little tired of the words “fisted” and “fisting”. Singh vastly overuses them and I kind of wish the woman would just find alternate words and phrases so that I’m not hearing the word multiple times in a single minute. Good advice for any writer is to read your work aloud. If Singh had done so, her sentences might not sound as repetitive as they sometimes do. And while I know that the effect might be muted in print, I think this overuse of some words would probably be just as bad there.
Still, I will definitely keep listening to the series. It might not be entirely believable in some aspects – I have a lot of questions about how some angel ages fit in with what I understand about evolution – but I can’t complain too much about those things.
It remains to be seen if the next five books will feature romances for the rest of the seven. My guess is that there’ll be at least one break in there, either for one of the other pairings hinted at or to further Elena and Raphael’s plots. Either way, only time will tell.
mouse Reads Books 