3 1/2 stars. Overall I think the author told a good story. There were two things that really bothered me, though. First, there were a lot of cheesy lines. I don't want to cross the mean line and call them 'hacky,' but I rolled my eyes more than a few times. Maybe they would have worked better in a 'regular' instead of urban fantasy; I don't know. Secondly, it is off-putting to me personally how dependent the heroine is on the men in her life. I'm not saying a kickass character can't need people, but it just seems like she is overly dependent on the men in her life. Along those same lines, everyone else in her life is a man with the exception of one character-whom she can't stand and is always criticizing. I feel like it is a really unfortunate theme in a lot of urban fantasy that to prove how 'tough' the main heroine is that she has to surround herself with only men. Why can't a badass lady have one or two equally badass female friends? It doesn't make your book YaYa Traveling Pants to put more than one lady in it if you write them well. However I do have hope that there will be at least one female addition to the regular characters in the series (without giving spoilers.) Darian: "“I’d taken offense at being called stupid time and again, but lo and behold! I was as dumb as a person could get. I’d orchestrated my own undoing with almost no effort at all. Fuck the world, how could I have been such an idiot?”Yes, that's what I spent most of the book wondering. Frankly, Darian's frequent forays into TSTL territory irritated me to the point I thought at times I might not finish the book. Instead, she finally seemed to have learned her lesson by the end and had suffered some serious consequences for her idiocy, so I ended up deducting only one star for the aggravation.I'm hoping Darian's new-found wisdom will carry over to the next book which I will read with the hope that I won't again want to slap her silly.
