A SHIFTER'S SIN

A Shifter's Sin by Debbie Cassidy
Book 1 in the Wolves of Hawthorne Cove series
Narrated by Keira Stevens and Troy Duran
Genre: urban fantasy
Format: ebook & audiobook

About A Shifter's Sin:

A Lycan that can’t shift is no use to anyone.

I’ve made it my mission to be useful to my pack. As pack enforcer, I’m fast and strong, but when the time comes to bond with my mate, it isn’t enough.

Rejection means lone wolf status and isolation from the pack. But when a package arrives with an unexpected inheritance, the pack that wants to shun me, suddenly has a new use for me.

Turns out, I’m the proud owner of a house in mysterious territory, rumoured to be home to a pack of beautifully twisted shifters. Hawthorne Cove is Impregnable to Lycans, but not to a half human like me.

Now I have a second chance to be accepted by my pack.

All I have to do is infiltrate the Hawthorne pack, find the source of their power and steal it.

Easier said than done.

Because once I pass the mystical boundaries surrounding the town, I’ll be absolutely, and totally at the mercy of the wolves of Hawthorne Cove.

Source: Info in the "About A Shifter's Sin" was taken from amazon on 03/11/2024.

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My Thoughts:

This is my first Debbie Cassidy read and am I glad to stumble upon this author!

About half-way through the book it made me think of the Innkeeper series by Ilona Andrews with magic houses and sentient magic...

The book ended in a huge cliffhanger though it ended the current dilemma in the book. I hate cliffhangers and that is one of the big reasons why this book will never get a 5 out of 5 with me.

There wasn't much of a plot. But then again, this is an urban fantasy, not a crime fiction. I was not expecting anything twisty.

The story telling quality was good enough that kept me reading through the end.

This is also my first Keira Stevens and Troy Duran listen. For both narrators. They make a good duo.

Quantitative Evaluation:

Story telling quality = 3.5
Character development = 4
Story itself = 3
Writing Style = 4
Ending = 1.5
World building = 5
Cover art = 4
Pace = (7 hrs and 19 mins listening time)
Plot = 2.5
Narration = 5

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5 cherries

Books In The Wolves of Hawthorne Cove Series:

 

Meet The Author

About Debbie Cassidy:

Debbie Cassidy lives in England, Bedfordshire, with her three kids and very supportive husband. Coffee and chocolate biscuits are her writing fuels of choice, and she is still working on getting that perfect tower of solitude built in her back garden. Obsessed with building new worlds and reading about them, she spends her spare time daydreaming and conversing with the characters in her head – in a totally non psychotic way of course. She writes Urban Fantasy, Fantasy and Reverse Harem Fantasy. All her books contain plenty of action, romance and twisty plots.

debbiecassidyauthor.com | x | facebook | amazon | goodreads

The Narrators

Keira Stevens:

Audiobook narrator / voice-over artist

goodreads

About Troy Duran:

Troy Duran is a passionate voice for audiobooks, and you'll hear this in each of over 250 titles featuring his warm, smoky, sometimes gritty baritone in romance, drama, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. Fans have described Troy's voice as "one click," "sex-on-a-stick," "instant-O," and "fire."

www.troyvoice.com | x | facebook1 | facebook2 | tiktok | instagram | linkedin | goodreads

FTC Disclosure:
The ebook and audiobook were purchased with private funds.
No money received for this review.

DEAD TO THE WORLD

Dead To The World by Annabel Chase
Book 1 in the Crossroads Queen series
Narrated by Vivienne Leheny
Genre: urban fantasy
Format: ebook & audiobook

About Dead To The World:

Lorelei Clay isn’t like other people.

She isn’t even like other supernaturals. Her specialties are the nightmares of the living, communication with the dead, and cooking bacon until it’s golden brown and perfectly crispy — no magic required.

Six months ago she moved to the ultimate fixer upper, a monstrosity from the Gilded Age that borders the local cemetery in the sleepy Pennsylvania town of Fairhaven. Lorelei is content to spend the next few years in solitude, renovating the house and avoiding humanity, until a missing young woman disrupts her plans. Lorelei’s search for the teenager means crossing paths with the residents she’s successfully avoided so far, including the human police chief, the coven, a cursed vampire, the assassins guild, the werewolf pack, and the mysterious and infuriatingly alluring owner of The Devil’s Playground, an elegant nightclub that caters to the local supernatural clientele.

Lorelei plans to find the girl quickly and return to the privacy of her castle walls before anyone learns her secrets, but you know what they say about the best laid plans…

Source: Info in the "About Dead To The World" was taken from GoodReads at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144085997-dead-to-the-world on 12/01/2024.

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My Thoughts:

So what does Fairhaven have that it is chuck full of supernaturals??

So, what exactly IS Lorelei?

What is that raven doing in the cover? Is that the black bird hanging around the Castle? What is it's story?

I do not like inconsistent plotting. She did her due deligence so she knew the way. That tells me that she did a recon (reconnaissance) so she knew the place before the meeting. But she does not know that the trail climbed? So what kind of recon did she do??

This is not my first Vivienne Leheny audiobook. Not even the second. Or third. With previous audiobooks, this narrator seemed ok. But for some reason in this one, Vivienne Leheny seems to pronounce words a little to quickly at times. Too "heavily"? Like, I thought she said "ha", instead of "hello". And I thought the character was being rude. But the ebook clearly says "hello" and not "ha". What was that all about??

Quantitative Evaluation:

Story telling quality = 3.5
Character development = 3.5
Story itself = 3.5
Writing Style = 4
Ending = 4
World building = 4
Cover art = 4
Pace = (7 hrs and 23 mins listening time)
Plot = 3.5
Narration = 4

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5 cherries

Books In The Crossroads Queen Series:

 

Meet The Author

About Annabel Chase:

Annabel Chase is the author of urban fantasy and cozy mystery novels. She would love to live in a magical town where she can shop at Ready-to-Were for the the perfect outfit, flirt with hot angels and vampires, and cook gourmet meals without exerting any effort.

annabelchase.com | twitter | facebook | instagram | amazon | goodreads

The Narrator

About Vivienne Leheny:

For over two decades, Vivienne Leheny has worked professionally in New York City and Los Angeles as an actor, voiceover artist and writer. She’s appeared on Off-Broadway and regional theatre stages, been screened at numerous film festivals (including Sundance in the 2019 opening night film: AFTER THE WEDDING), toured the northeast doing stand-up, and her writing has been published in national publications.

Vivienne has built a successful audiobook narration business, reading under her own name as well as under the pseudonyms, “Nola Zandry” and “Lily Collingwood.” She has a home studio and records using punch & roll software. Currently narrating six ongoing series, she also has numerous stand-alone book narrations, all of which are doing brisk sales on Audible, Amazon and iTunes. She’s narrated titles for Harper Collins, Macmillan, Recorded Books, and Simon & Schuster, among other audiobook publishers.

Vivienne will soon be recording her 150th audiobook narration.

Her audiobook narration course, The Voice in their Ear, has been a sell-out Maine Media Workshops+College, where she’s also taught her Putting Your Voice to Work: Building a Career in Voiceover curriculum, while her Breaking Into Audiobooks seminar for the SAG Foundation fills up quickly and with long wait lists. She’s also taught audiobook narration at the Caymichael Patten Studio.

She’s recorded over a thousand promotions for NBC programming (Saturday Night Live, Nightly News, Days of our Lives, Late Night with Conan O’Brien), including over a decade with The Today Show. She’s also done promotional spots for HBO, Showtime, and Bravo. Vivienne has voiced numerous national commercial campaigns, including Coca Cola, Fruit of the Loom, Florida Orange Juice, Bristol Meyers Squibb, Maxwell House and Revlon.

Her narration work has run the gamut, from Chain Gang Girls on Oxygen to Charles and Di: Once Upon a Time on TLC, from Fine Living’s Esquire’s Man at His Best to the six-part series Killer Outbreaks on Animal Planet, where she was the voice of the Bubonic Plague and West Nile Virus. She’s also the voice for the mysterious and disturbing “Phoenix Project” in the popular video game Assassin’s Creed, Unity.

www.vivienneleheny.com | twitter | facebook | goodreads

FTC Disclosure:
The ebook and audiobook were bought with private funds.
No money received for this review.

CURSED FAE

Cursed Fae by Brogan Thomas
Book 5 in the Creatures of the Otherworld series
Format: ebook

About Cursed Fae:

She’s got green skin, twisted tusks, and a ferocious love of canned pineapple. And her high-stakes day job just landed her a do-or-die mission…

Pepper Sterling relies on her gifts to hide and stay safe. Born with the ability to manipulate stone with ease and disappear at will, the young troll left her unwelcoming clan and found work running messages between Earth and Faerie. But after fleeing a nasty band of elves who slapped a slave rune on her arm, she’s left with a broken wrist and a testily ungrateful tiger-shifter guest in her hidden lair.

Confused by powers that are inexplicably growing after the confrontation, she’s stunned when the snarly cat accuses her of illegal magic use and knocks her out with a spell. With rising tensions attracting the attention of the Lord of Winter and news of a dryad in danger only Pepper can rescue, she’s staggered by a shocking revelation about her true nature…

Will she have to confront Death himself to save the day?

Source: Info in the "About Cursed Fae" was taken from GoodReads at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59680609-cursed-fae on 02/02/2024.

Buy Link(s):

My Thoughts:

Love to see Forrest again!! It's like meeting a long lost friend! Character development? Can never go lower than 4! Having said that, I was not impressed with Pepper trying to face up to the bad guys and then let them beat her again just so that her tiger can save her again. I'm sorry, but, that is lame... However, the story telling quality is so wonderful that this book whizzed by.

On the first round of reading before the audiobook was released, I tried to read the ebook as slowly as possible and savour it as long as I could. But it still went too fast for me!

I am an old fan of this author and this series and can't wait for Cursed Dragon!

Quantitative Evaluation:

Story telling quality = 5
Character development = 4.5
Story itself = 5
Writing Style = 5
Ending = 4.5
World building = 5
Cover art = 4.5
Pace = 5
Plot = 4

Overall Rating: 5 out of 5 cherries

Books In The Creatures of the Otherworld Series:

 

Books In The Rebel of the Otherworld Series:

Amazon

Amazon

Meet The Author

About Brogan Thomas:

Brogan lives in Ireland with her husband and their eleven furry children: five furry minions of darkness (aka the cats), four hellhounds (the dogs), and two traditional unicorns (fat, hairy Irish cobs).

In 2019 she decided to embrace her craziness by writing about the imaginary people that live in her head. Her first love is her number-one favourite furry child Bob the cob, then reading. When not reading or writing, she can be found knee-deep in horse poo and fur while blissfully ignoring all adult responsibilities.

broganthomas.com | twitter | facebook | instagram | bookbub | pinterest | youtube | amazon | goodreads

FTC Disclosure:
The ebook and audiobook copies of the book were purchased with private funds.
No money received for this review.