Product Description

Nalini Singh pulls away another dark layer of sheer desire, revealing passions unknown in her latest novel about the world of the Psy.

A woman returns from a leopard changeling's past, making him question his base animal instincts-and unlock the darkest secrets of his heart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35075 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780425220160
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Earth of 2080 continues a cold war with the chilling aliens the Psy in Singh's fourth fierce installment of the Psy-Changeling series (after Caressed by Ice). Half-human, half-leopard changeling Clay Bennett is shocked when lovely Talin McKade, wracked with illness and similarly half-changeling, returns to his life, having disappeared from his childhood 20 years before. Talin works at San Francisco's Shine Foundation, dedicated to helping gifted but needy children, and a growing number of her missing charges have been turning up sans brains. There's plenty of purring passion to keeps things hot as the Leopard shape-shifters Clay and Tally fall breathlessly in love, while the Psy continue to use children as guinea pigs for developing a hive mind. While this is paranormal romance at its best, newcomers are advised to check out the earlier adventures first. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

This Series Just Gets Better Every Time
"Slave to Sensation", book one, set the romance world on fire with a unique, new element in a genre rife with emotions - a race with the potential for cool, icy, emotionless precision, the Psy. Their counterparts are the animalistic and earthier Changelings, packs and herds of men and women that take on the forms of wolves, leopards, deer and much more than we could imagine. Now Singh brings mere humans into the fold. Are they just the worker bees of her futuristic society, or do they hold the key to so much more?

Clay Bennet is barely holding on. He's dangerously close to going rogue, even within the confines a loving and healthy pack - the San Francisco DarkRiver leopards. Too tangled in a tragic past, it eats at him still. The slaying of a depraved monster may have seen the streets rid of one more evil, but it cost Clay his freedom and the person he cared more about than anything. When he finds out she's dead, well, Clay no longer had a reason to be good himself.

Talin McKade vowed to stay away from the man who used to be her best friend. An act of violence, born of violence, triggered her flight and fear didn't allow her close...till violence once again brought her full circle to the one person she always wanted to count on. It's her job to see that children like she had been have a chance at a better life. And when her kids start dying, she takes a wild card from the past, hoping Clay will help her solve the mystery. Little did she know, once marked by a leopard, there's no going back.

What was interesting about Clay and Talin's relationship is how seamlessly it's integrated into the storyline in this installment. Actually, Singh does this extremely well in each book, the marriage of the love story with the overall plot, but the way it was done in "Mine to Possess" was just flawless! The events unfolding weren't just happening to and around the main characters, they were happening because of them and vice versa. Take one of them away from the other and suddenly neither will make sense. Everything happening in these books is happening for a reason and there's not an ounce of fat in the mix. "Mine to Possess" is perhaps the most integral book of the series to date. Not only does it reach all the way back to "Slave to Sensation" (book one) and reinforce what we found out there, but it seems to be a major turning point in the Changling struggles against the more insidious Psy Council. So, it is heavy on info, but you'll find no dumping of it here. I believe we're getting what we do because it's vital, necessary and the right time in the series. Beware, there is some rather shocking violence in this one as we continue to discover just how ruthless and cold the Psy are (though it's not portrayed as graphically as, say, a horror piece), but Clay and Talin's relationship, to me, never got dragged under because of it, but actually shone brighter because the dilemmas actually made them come together, closer than they'd ever been before. It helped them, sometimes forced them, to come to terms and I just don't think that anything happening less plot-wise would have enabled that transformation in their conflict better, but hindered it instead or made it seem unbelievable. I loved the way they came together and how they came to terms with their interwoven past. Hands down, this is my favorite book of the series to date, as well as my favorite couple. The next book is titled "Hostage to Pleasure" about DarkRiver sentinal Dorian.

Not as good as I expected. I liked the characters, but too little time was spent on building the romance. Core story was slow.
The Psy- Changeling Series:

Slave to Sensation

Visions of Heat

Caressed by Ice

Mine to Possess

Hostage to Pleasure (Dorian's story, due for release in Sept. 2008)


Usually, I devour Nalini Singh's Psy- Changeling books. I was disappointed with this one. I found it very easy to put down, and never felt a great pull to read more and find out what happened next. The greatest dilemma between the main couple was far too easy to figure out early on, so it never built any real concern in me. Basically, the story just floated along without ever reaching any of the exciting peaks that we expect from Nalini Singh. It took me about a week to finish... that was a shock.

That being said, the ideas that the story is based upon are terrific. The characters are as vivid as always. Love scenes steamy, although you don't get to them until page 216. All of the major characters are included from previous books. Some new characters are introduced that definitely built my desire to continue reading this series. Despite my disappointment, I can't wait to read Dorian's story.



Clay and Talin were best friends as children. Growing up together in a low income apartment building, Clay made it his personal job to protect his little "Tally". At hearing her cry of distress, Clay burst into her foster- father's apartment to find the man molesting her. In blind rage, Clay tore the man to shreds. When the authorities took Clay away, he was sent to juvenile prison for several years. When he finally finished his time, Clay's first thought was for Tally. When he called the foster agency to ask for her location, Clay was told that she had died in a car accident. With his soul destroyed, Clay almost went rabid. It was then that the DarkRiver pack found and adopted him.

Two decades later:

Talin needs help fighting a beast who is abducting children from the youth help organization she works for. She only knows of one man who may be strong enough to fight the beast. Unfortunately, she believes he may be a beast himself. After watching Clay tear her foster- father to shreds as a child, she asked the foster agency to tell Clay she was dead. Knowing what he was capable of, she feared his temper could one day turn on her as well. Now, with children at risk, Talin knows that stopping the kidnapper is more important than her own safety.

Clay is torn apart all over again. Not only has his Tally been alive all these years, she has purposely let him believe she died, nearly destroying him with grief. Regardless, now that he has found her, he will never let her go. Something in his blood knows that Tally belongs to him. He'll do whatever it takes to erase her fear of his leopard half. He'll also help to save the children who are being stolen. The entire DarkRiver pack cherishes kids of all races. They will gladly take part in ending the threat.

Over the following weeks, the mystery begins to unfold. Learning that the kidnapper is now after Tally, Clay plans to deliver his death personally. He prays that Tally will not fear his predator nature again. She is his mate. Changelings mate only once, for life. If she dies, he will gladly follow.

Talin has choices to make. She loves Clay, but must overcome her fears. She not only fears his beast, she fears abandonment. Although she knows Clay didn't choose to leave as a child, her own inner child blames him for abandoning her. Worse, she believes that she has a degenerative brain disease. Soon, she will die. If she allows a mating to happen with Clay, it will mean the end of his life too. With so many odds against them, Tally feels the future is hopeless. Clay refuses to believe there is no cure for her disease. Leaning on his strength and hope, Talin decides to be grateful for the only true happiness she has ever known.



With all of that happening, how could I have been bored? The pace of the story dragged. The mystery of her disease was easily figured out. The children were saved so quickly that Clay barely broke a sweat.

Another thing that truly bothered me from start to finish was Talin's resentment of Clay. I can understand her being afraid after seeing the destruction he was capable of when enraged. That would be a lot for a child to deal with. But the fact that she held his imprisonment against him made me dislike her. He killed for her, went to prison for her, and never regretted a minute because it was worth it to him to know that she would never be touched by foster- father again. As a little girl, her immaturity may make her feel like he abandoned her. But at 28 she should have long outgrown that way of thinking. Also, the fact that she continued to let him grieve her for so many years was cruel. When reading a novel, if I don't like one of the main characters I find it hard to love the story.



If you'd like to read the whole series, which is terrific despite my disappointment in this book, here are the links of the books to date:

Slave to Sensation (Psy-Changelings, Book 1)

Visions of Heat (Psy-Changelings, Book 2)

Caressed By Ice (Psy-Changelings, Book 3)

("Mine to Possess" is book 4)



If you enjoy Paranormal Changeling romance novels, I highly suggest the "Immortals After Dark" series:

A Hunger Like No Other (The Immortals After Dark Series, Book 1) One of my personal all- time favorite romance novels!

No Rest for the Wicked (The Immortals After Dark, Book 2)

Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night (The Immortals After Dark, Book 3)

Not That Innocent (Anthology that includes a new IAD story!)

Dark Needs at Night's Edge (The Immortals After Dark Series, Book 4)

Dark Desires After Dusk (The Immortals After Dark, Book 5)

Fourth in Psy-Changeling Series
This is the fourth in Nalini Singh's series of books about the world of the Psy, Changelings and Humans. The first two books "Slave to Sensation" and "Visions of Heat" featured Psy women who escaped from the world of Mr Spock-like emotionless after finding their mates amongst the Changelings big cats. The third book, "Caressed by Ice", took Werewolf Brenna as the heroine and Psy assassin Judd as the hero. This fourth book is the first that introduces a human as one of the main subjects - Talin McKay. Tally is a social worker whose troubled childhood still haunts her - as did her only real friend in her youth, Clay. Clay is a Leopard Changeling and when he killed Tally's abusive foster father and went to prison for the crime Tally disappeared from his life, requesting that he be told she had died in a car accident.

However when some of the children Tally oversees go missing and then are found dead she realises that she needs assistance to get to the bottom of the disappearances and her former friend Clay, now an important person in the DarkRiver Pack, can help. The Clay she knew as a young boy has changed into a wild and dangerous man of whom she is initially afraid. When Clay brings Tally back to his pack and she starts to interact with the others they work together to find out what's happened to the young people and it's a race against time to rescue young Jon before he is killed. But can Clay and Tally get past the issues of mistrust and abandonment of the previous twenty years in order to find their friendship again - and perhaps more?

The characters in the previous books all appear in this one, along with a couple of new characters who will probably feature in future books. Once again Nalini Singh has written a tightly-plotted and enjoyable book with her alternative world with the Psy/Changeling/Human triumvirate taking on a new twist. As with the previous three books much of the romance between hero and heroine is based on physical touch, 'skin privileges', and although Tally isn't Psy she is a damaged young woman because of her past. I wonder what the author would do if one of her characters didn't mind touch as that's such a part of her writing style! She wrote the character of Clay very well as a part-animal, part human and a frightening but also loyal and reliable man. Tally wasn't always as easy to get a handle on and the underlying thread of her illness was dealt with in a rather easy way. Still, like the other books in the series, this was a worthwhile read and I look forward to the next book.