Review: Claimed by Shadow

Reviewed by Jen
 

I’ll admit it. I get a little bit of a one track mind when it comes to books.  If there is so much of a whiff of a relationship forming, I fixate on it and build up all of my anticipation around it.  I stay true-blue to my couple. 3rd parties are the enemy.  There is no indecision or uncertainty… just relationship-worshipping in its purest sense.  Until I started this damn series.  Never have I felt so torn… so fickle… about who I want a heroine to end up with.  I’ve got to give credit where credit is due, Karen Chance had me rooting for Tomas, Mircea, and even Pritkin to be the ONE to finally seal the deal with Cassie.  And even now, I’m not sure where my loyalties lie.

The story picks up just after the events of Touch the Dark.  Cassie has escaped the senate, but reveals she stole a few objects of power on her way out of the door.  She is looking for Tony, not only because of past issues with him, but because she wants to free her father’s ghost, and neutralize Myra, the other heir to the Pythia power.   (She thinks Tony is the key to finding them both.)

Just as she approaches a member of Tony’s organization to try to get a fix on him, she is attacked by mages.  She is forced to make an alliance with the mage assassin Pritkin to escape.  They decide to work together to get to Faerie, where they believe Tony and Myra are hiding.  Pritkin wants to get to Myra for his own reasons.

While all this is going on, Cassie discovers that Mircea has placed a geis on her… a powerful spell that prevents her from sleeping with other men.  If she makes a move to do so, she and the potential partner experience great pain.  But this is at odds with the power of the Pythia which is urging Cassie to lose her virginity in order to claim her full power.

Before she can even set out for Faerie, Cassie is being sent back in time. Myra is trying to kill Mircea in the past, to remove his protection of Cassie in the present.  Let me stop here and say that altering the events of the past can create some nasty paradoxes.  Some are addressed by the author.  But admittedly, some left me with more questions than answers.  The biggest is this: If Cassie met Mircea in the past and altered the timeline, how could the events of the first book have played out the way they did?  Or are we to assume they went differently? If so, how?  Clearly, Mircea remembers their past meetings in this book. It creates a bit of a mess in my head.  But rather than let it ruin the book for me, I just filed it away as something that didn’t quite fit and tried to let it go.

This book is amazingly sexy for only having one sex scene in it.  It’s full of action, twists, turns and some real emotion as well.  There are many plot threads left unresolved, not the least of which is this mess with the geis.  I’m looking forward to see how the author goes forward from here and whether the knots in the plot created by time travel manage to unweave or get more complicated. 4 stars.

Claimed by Shadow

by Karen Chance

Release Date: April 3, 2007

Publisher: Penguin Group, USA