MASTER OF SMOKE by Angela Knight.
Berkley/Penguin Group
Release Date: January 4, 2011
Gold Coin Rating: 4.1
Heat Level: Bonfire
{Click here for Tuesday's Treasures rating system guide}
Master of Smoke is smokin’ hot with fast moving, action-packed sequences and sizzling love scenes.
Eva Roman is a comic book geek coping with surviving a werewolf attack when she stumbles upon a shapeshifter in the throes of a similar assault. Upon rescuing him, she discovers that he’s lost his memory, except that he knows he’s been dreaming of her for weeks.
Eva decides to call him David, unaware that he’s a Sidhe warrior that shares his body and mind with two other entities, Cat and Smoke. David’s attacker, Warlock, is the leader of a fanatical werewolf aristocracy. He seeks Smoke’s magick and memories in order to destroy the Mageverse and rule the human Earth.
Eva risks her life to help David reunite with his spirit brothers and then must discover if she can love David for who he is in his entirety, rather than the fractured man she first met. For David, Eva is his heart and soul and he will fight the battle of his life to keep her safe and win her love.
Eva’s internal dialogue with her “Fluffy” werewolf self is hilarious and provides some needed comic relief during intense scenes.
David/Smoke’s struggle for Eva’s acceptance tugs at the heart. Before he’s reunited with his other selves, he ponders:
“Here he was, one fragment of some other man, waiting for the rest of his of his mind to return. Would he even exist once they came back?
Would he still love Eva?
David winced. And there it was: the trouble. What kind of idiot let himself become obsessed with a woman in a situation like this? All he was doing was setting himself up for more pain.”
After he’s made whole again, doubts still linger.
“But I’m still your David.” There was a trace of a question in the words. “Aren’t I?”Master of Smoke is the 10th book in the Mageverse series. I’ve not read the entire collection but I have read Master of Wolves, which is book 5. Based on what I learned in that story, I noted what seemed like a minor inconsistency in Master of Smoke regarding the relationship and interaction between the Direkind and the knights of the Mageverse. Since I’m reading the series out of sequence, it’s possible that this tiny issue exists only because I haven’t read all the books leading up to this particular story.
Eva stopped in her tracks to stare up at him.
That’s when it hit her just how much she’d been hurting him. Her refusal to accept Cat, her unconscious tendency to call him “David” even after his three personalities recombined—all of it had communicated a very ugly message.
“What have I done to you?” She asked the question in a low, shaking voice.”
The weave of the Arthurian tales, werewolves, vampires, and the Sidhe, with our modern world is creative and ingenious. There is so much going on in this story that if you have a difficult time focusing you might get lost in the hustle. Some extended scenes made me a little impatient to get to the next sequence. But, I admire how Angela Knight is able to keep all those plot plates spinning and push the story forward in a credible paranormal fashion.
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