Cale Valens is one of the ancient immortals, born in 230 BCE, and the nephew of Marguerite Argeneau, matchmaker extraordinaire. He's also a serious, staid fellow, a mercenary in his previous life but now a businessman in Europe with great taste in expensive suits. When he arrives in New York for a multiple-immortal wedding, Marguerite tells him he needs to meet Sam's sister Alex. Sam has two sisters whom she's very close to, Jo and Alex, and didn't want to change when she met her lifemate, Mortimer, because it would mean never seeing them again. So she's been keen to find her sisters lifemates too, even though the likelihood seems slim that all three of them would be lifemates to immortals. But with Jo settled down with another Argeneau - and turned as well - Alex is the only one left.

A successful restaurateur and chef in Toronto, Alex has no time for men, especially as she prepares to open her second, much larger restaurant. Everything that could possibly go wrong has, including fire to the property and the wrong carpet being installed. She's fired her project manager and is using her own personal savings to try and get the restaurant finished in time for opening night, but it means she can't be head chef at her other restaurant. When her recently-promoted head chef, a pompous twit who's adopted a French name to sound more authentic, suddenly quits on her, Alex is desperate to find a chef. That's when Cale Valens turns up and declares he is a master chef from France.

Except that Cale can't cook, and hasn't eaten real food in centuries. But when he meets Alex for the first time, he discovers that he can't read her mind - which makes her his lifemate (there are other clues, but this is the most important). Pretending to be a chef is his friend Bricker's idea, and it's disastrous - luckily, they can change people's memories and make them think they're eating gourmet food instead of blackened fish. Cale needs a new plan, desperately, because he badly needs to get to know Alex and give her a chance to get to know him.

This is one of the funny Argeneau novels - some of them are more serious, though they all have Sands' trademark humour in the banter - and a joy to read. It is predictable: it's quite obvious that someone is messing with Alex's restaurant and it's equally obvious who that is, but I guess we can put it down to Alex's nature and how preoccupied and stressed she is that she can't see it. She's a very together kind of woman, strong of mind and a great heroine. Cale is a delight, he's quiet and considerate and genuinely wants to get to know Alex and spend time with her so she can get to know him - unlike some other series (*cough cough* Feehan's Carpathians), being lifemates doesn't mean instant love and sex. When an immortal discovers someone they can't read, they know only that this is someone they can live with, that they're compatible with. They still have to learn about the person and find love with them, and build a proper relationship.

So in Hungry for You we get more of a focus on building their relationship, with the mystery plot merely a device to bring Cale and Alex together. And their relationship develops in believable ways and you can see the chemistry building between them. I liked both the protagonists in Hungry For You; they didn't feel like stock characters (which can be a problem with long-running series, *cough cough* Christine Feehan *cough*).

I love the books in this series that are set in Sands' native Canada, though this one didn't have the landmarks that were in a couple of the earlier books. We also get other well-known characters appearing in this one, notably Bricker, Mortimer, Marguerite and Lucian and their lifemates.

If you're not familiar with Sands' Argeneau series, she has a more original take on the vampire-like immortals (they always stress that they're not vampires, and it's true, they're not - but they do have fangs and drink blood). The immortals originated from Atlantis, where advanced technology created super nanos that, injected in the host body, would repair the damage of, say, cancer, and essentially cure people. When Atlantis collapsed, the people with the nanos still in them had no way of removing them once they'd done their job, and because of the constant daily damage to the body from ageing, the sun, food etc., the nanos kept repairing the body - and this required blood. These days, the immortals drink bagged blood except in dire emergencies, and to keep their numbers low they can only have a child once every hundred years. The nanos have made them sensitive to the sun, but also stronger, faster and given them special skills like mind reading. I'm not an Atlantis believer but I enjoy this unique take on vampires.

Overall, this was a highly enjoyable instalment in the series, and if you haven't read any I would recommend this as a good one to start with.