Shapeshifters good and bad

TITLE: In Sheep's Clothing (in The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance anthology)
AUTHOR: Meljean Brook

This is such a short story that I checked out the book from the library, sat at one of the tables there, read the story and checked the book back in. I enjoyed it. Brook doesn't make the mistake of trying to cram a whole relationship in barely 20 pages, so what we get is more like a vignette. The heroine has spent the last few years away from her home town, having left after a werewolf attack. Now that she's got her new nature under control, she feels she can come back. She arrives in the middle of a spate of attacks by a serial killer, and her werewolf senses allow her to help the man she loves, who's the sheriff, catch him. Interesting characters, and since hero and heroine had known each other very well before she had to leave town, even a believable romance.

Meljean Brook now has this short story available for free at her website: here.

MY GRADE: A B.



TITLE: The Mane Squeeze
AUTHOR: Shelly Laurenston

Laurenston was recommended to me as a very funny author, who does strong heroines and really yummy heroes. Well, the latter seemed to be the case in the first bit of the book that I read, but the first two, not really. I guess the problem was that both the humour and the heroine's strength seemed to be predicated on constant brawling. Yawn. I also didn't have the best opinion of the heroine's intelligence after a supposedly funny scene where it emerged that she was convinced (really convinced) that hospitals were death traps, not because of MRSA, or anything like that, but because it was almost certain that once you were there, the doctors would kill you to harvest your organs. Why the paranoia? Because she'd once seen a PBS documentary about it. Yeah, not the sort of humour that works for me, that. Additionally, there was a barrage of characters I didn't know, clearly from earlier books in the series, and I couldn't make heads or tails of who was who or what and how they were all related.

MY GRADE: DNF.