"Lover Unleashed" by J.R. Ward

Disclaimer:  This book was a personal purchase, in hard cover.


I am not going to go into a long winded review or use my standard format for reviews. There are already too many spoilers as it is, and frankly, I don't need to "illustrate" that much to make a point across.

To make the story short, the BDB is no longer a paranormal romance series, it is an urban fantasy series. This book in particular had 1 main plot: Vishous/Butch/Jane and several subplots one of which includes Payne and Manny Manello's love story. And this is the root of my problem: I was expecting more on Payne and Manny, not a Book 2 on Vishous/Butch/Jane. For me, that came completely out of left field.

I had been getting more and more disappointed with the series, but with "Lover Avenged" I felt that it was still worth my spending money on these books on release. "Lover Mine" was a an okay experience, but this one, well, suffice it to say this one is the last one I buy in hard cover. From this point forward, I'll wait for the paperback. I don't have the same sense of anticipation I used to have towards this series.

In all honesty, I didn't appreciate all of the distraction involving Vishous/Butch/Jane, then the m/m subplot involving Quinn & Blay, then the standard lesser issue, and to put the cherry on top, a character that belongs to her other series. Was it really necessary to convolute things further with a character that is supposed to be part of a future book in her other series with a mystery/murder subplot kind of deal?

Bottom line, this series is no longer part of my auto-buy list. I just can't spend money on books of which I end up skipping more than pages than I actually read just to get to the parts that I am actually interested in.

I have to add that it saddens me.  I was so thrilled with the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, the first 3-4 books were fantastic.  A blogger reviewer mentioned once that she never felt the series was paranormal romance.  Frankly, I never thought otherwise until Book 5.  Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all those subplots should have clued me in. 


Mireya