Review: The Covert Wolf

Reviewed by Jen
 

Matthew is a Draicon wolf who serves in an elite Navy SEAL team of supernatural soldiers.  Their existence is a secret, but their service is invaluable, as they help fight demons and other evil entities bent on chaos and destruction.

The story begins with the death of Matt's best friend Adam.  Someone used a powerful orb to pinpoint the team's location and send fire-wielding demons to ambush them.  Now, Matt is on the hunt for the orb and whoever orchestrated Adam's death. His boss forces him to pair with Sienna, a Draicon-Fae hybrid, who wants to bring the object back to her people.  The SEALs have different plans for the orb, but they keep that to themselves.

Sienna thinks if she recovers the orb, she'll be accepted by the Fae who cast her out when she came of age.  Her Draicon heritage made her an outcast and all she wants is for the loneliness to end.  She despises the Draicons, because she was told her wolfen father raped her Fae mother and was ultimately responsible for her death.  She considers the shifters to be nothing more than animals, which makes her very unhappy to have Matt as a partner.  He's not much happier with the arrangement, since the Dark Fae killed Adam.

But despite their initial disdain for one another, an attraction builds between them over the course of their investigation.  It's a slow build, with a lot of sexual tension, which I appreciate. I also thought the sex was great, once it finally came to pass.  My biggest problem with the relationship is that neither one of them wanted a future with the other.  All the way until the very end, Matt is determined that he is going to leave Sienna and wipe her memories so he can get back to his job. And she is so anti-wolf that she can't see past the blinders that the Fae is her whole world.  It's hard to get behind a relationship when it's so devalued by both the hero and the heroine.  Even when it was obvious that only the other person could make them happy, they stubbornly stuck to their old ways of thinking. It was frustrating.

The orb arc was kind of convoluted.  I had a hard time making a connection between Adam's death and the end-game for the bad guys.  All the scheming and plotting was complicated, with big reveals at the end.

The book is tied to Bonnie Vanak's Draicon series, but it has a decidedly different feel.  It's the first in a spinoff series surrounding Matt's SEAL unit, so it would be easy for a new reader to jump in.  Honestly, I enjoyed the last couple of Draicon books a bit more than I liked this one.

Rating: C

*ARC Provided by NetGalley

Click to purchase: Amazon

The Covert Wolf

by Bonnie Vanak
Release Date: July 24, 2012
Publisher: Harlequin