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This was a very pleasant surprise. I liked Kit almost immediately. she's completely out of her league in the monster arena, but she knows that and plans accordingly. It was also surprising that I didn't mind her lipping off all the time. There were definitely times when she would have been better keeping her mouth shut, but I couldn't help admiring her determination to stand up against evil and call it what it is.

I'm having trouble writing about the other elements of the story. The magical beings were standard-with-twists and that's not a bad thing. The action was solid and the pacing better than average. The side characters fell a little too neatly into helper/hinderer and people died a little easily for me to contemplate the rest of the series without trepidation.

The meat of the story is Kit's background, though. She's more than a little broken from an abusive upbringing. She draws on that a bit when she steps between innocents and bad people, but she's also obviously still dealing with the emotional (and sometimes physical) fallout. She has healed enough to go on, but is still in process and that shows. Frankly, Daniels does this very well, I thought, without making it tiresome or tedious.

Which is why I had a really hard time with Damon. I liked him well-enough, but his actions in the start of the book set him back considerably. He goes monster-alpha in bad ways due to miscalculation and stupidity. And while you can see his regret for pretty much the entire rest of the book, it's still hard to come back from and see him as part of Kit's life. He manages, but only because of some high-quality on-screen changes. I really like who he became in the end—so much so that I don't mind them ending up together despite initial feelings of "no way is he coming back from that".

Also, I had to develop a high tolerance for bad editing. We're talking a handful of revision artifacts per chapter.

So not a clear win. Still, it's a solid four stars, even with weaknesses. I'm not sure I can continue the series, because skimming the future blurbs fills me with foreboding and I'm a romantic at heart. Still, it was time well-spent even if I choose to stop here.

A note about Steamy: Very light steam, really. There's only one sex scene and it wasn't over-long at that. There's some minor amatory pieces otherwise, but not terribly much.