Review: Hot and Badgered

Hot and Badgered by Shelly Laurenston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let me introduce you to three half sisters, born of Freddy MacKilligan, a promiscuous criminal honey badger and three different women.

Charlie, the eldest, is half wolf-half honey badger. Her mother raised all three girls and Charlie has spent her entire life keeping her younger siblings out of trouble. Max, the second daughter is all honey badger and borderline psychotic. Stevie the youngest is half tiger-half honey badger, a musical and scientific genius she is also neurotic and likes nothing better than checking herself into very expensive mental hospitals and treating them like spas.

The book opens with Charlie getting a phone call early one morning telling her to get out of her Italian hotel room, before she knows it armed men are breaking into her room and her only escape (naked) is into the room of another hotel guest. Berg Dunn is a bear shifter, acting as security for Cooper Jean-Louis Parker, the jackal shifter and prodigal musician and bored out of his mind until a naked woman burst into their hotel suite, covered in blood from gunshot wounds, and followed by men in black military tactical wear. How great an opening is that?

Charlie knows that something like this can only mean one of two things - or both. Either her dead-beat Dad has done something monumentally stupid (again) or someone is after her genius sister (again). As it happens, it's both.

This has a slightly different feel to Shelly Laurenston's other books, and that's no bad thing. It's still funny, there are still tons of shifters, lots of my favourite characters from previous books make an appearance, there's brawling, there's baking, there's a BBQ, there's a wedding, there's rocket launchers and roller derby. Maybe the humour is gentler? Maybe the characters are gentler? Berg is just one giant softie (despite being part of a private security firm) and Shen? Cutie!

Anyway, what I think I am trying to say is that this is different to the Magnus Pack series, just as that is different to the Pride series, just as that is different to the Call of Crows series. Shelly Laurenston is exploring a different pack and I am dying to see what happens with Max and Stevie.

A great start to a new series.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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