First review in a while...let's see if I can still write one!

Series Note:
8th book in Shannon McKenna's "McClouds & Friends" series. There's a whole lot of backstory between these books, especially between this one and the last one so I would recommend reading the series in order. But that's just me.

Summary:
Bruno Ranieri has been struggling a bit since his adopted brother Kev McCloud returned to the bosom of his birth family. Though he's loathe to admit it, he's jealous of the McClouds getting Kev back while he's losing his best friend. But Bruno's life takes a strange turn when Lily Parr walks into his aunt's diner. And he'll be lucky if he lives through the day.

Why? Because Lily Parr has brought nothing but trouble with her. She's gotten on the bad side of a psycho narcissist who think he can brainwash people and create a superior breed of humans. And now he's send his super warriors after Lily, bringing them right to Bruno's doorstep. What neither really know is that Bruno is already deeply entrenched in this mystery.

Things get complicated when Bruno and Lily can't seem to stay away from each other (physically). And even more complicated when everywhere they turn someone is trying to kill them. It seems like their foe knows their every move. It'll take all their wits to stay alive and find out if they were meant to be with each other.

Review:
I've been reading this series since close to the beginning. So it's safe to say that I enjoy it. I like the way Shannon McKenna tells a story. She's raw and gritty and doesn't paint things over with pretty words. Which I like. It comes off more real...it's drives me nuts when I read a book where characters say ridiculous things to refer to body parts and fake swear. People generally don't do that. So I appreciate that McKenna keeps is real, in that sense.

On a more specific level about this book I thought it started off rather slow. Or maybe it's because the early part of this book focuses more on Lily, a completely new character to this series. There's a little bit of a lack of connection and things just seem to kind of plod along a bit.

For me, the book didn't really pick up until Aaro and the McClouds get involved. Then everything really just seems to jump into place. The action picks up, there's a greater connection to the characters and everything just gets more interesting.

I really liked that McKenna gave us so much of the McClouds (& Friends). You get to see what going on with all of them, especially Tam and Val, and it's a nice continuity from the past books. McKenna also addresses one of the things I didn't like from the last book - which was that you never really felt the reunion between Kev and his brothers, but in this book you get to read about them together and see that there's still some tension between them over what Kev went through.

The storyline is a bit out there. An evil mastermind raising people to brainwash them and create a superior breed of humans. Toss some other extreme details in there and you just have to kind of shake you head at it and accept it's fiction and anything's possible. It does take some of the realism away but I didn't mind it. McKenna wrote the plot well and the action was great.

And the romance...starts off really great. There's some serious heat between these two and they really seem to connect. The action and suspense of the story kind of get in the way for a chunk of the book. The romantic conflict between the two at the end didn't quite work for me (Lily was a bit unreasonable, in my opinion) but otherwise I enjoyed reading about these two.

On a random note...I hated the cover to this book. It was so ill-fitting for a gritty, raw romantic suspense. It looked more like a picture that would be on the cover of a Lisa Kleypas historical romance than a Shannon McKenna romantic suspense. It annoyed me the entire time I was reading.

WARNING, this book contains: explicit language and sex, lots of violence, some disturbing imagery of an underage girl being stalked