I picked up the first book on Saturday and was done with the third by the end of the week. Like Pringles, you can’t have just one.
Hot and Badgered – 4.25 stars
When a naked woman tumbles onto his hotel balcony while escaping her enemies, Berg’s happy to give her a T-shirt and a gun, but doesn’t expect to see her again. But it turns out that Charlie’s problems are manifest, and when they bring her to Manhattan, he’s happy to lend her a hand.
This is my first foray into Laurenston’s work, and while I knew her work was action-packed, violent, and comic, I still underestimated exactly how much. Everywhere you turn in this book is another plot point, and since there’s a ton of plots going on at once that means they’re all bouncing around dizzyingly, but you learn to sort them out and follow along. I enjoyed the romance between Charlie and Berg, but the real draw is the often slap-happy but ultimately loving relationship between the McKilligan sisters.
I also loved how Laurenston depicts her shifters. Whatever the opposite of anthropomorphism is what all the characters have going on, for better or for worse, and it’s utterly delightful to read about shifters who aren’t just people with animal ears and a tail stuck on.
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In a Badger Way – 3.5 stars
High-strung, brilliant Stevie is terrified of most things, but she’s perfectly comfortable around laid-back giant panda shifter Shen. And when she gets roped into investigating a scientist who may be experimenting on hybrid shifters, she’s comfortable to have him accompany her as her bodyguard – and decides that he’s now her boyfriend as well.
I don’t live far from the Smithsonian National Zoo, and my favorite thing to do there is to go watch the giant pandas demolish enormous stalks of bamboo. Laurenston captures that that repetitive bite-peel-chomp-chomp-toss so perfectly that it is apparent to me that she watched many videos in research for this.
The plots a bit more disjointed in this book – though I was more interested in the whole mad scientist thing, we somehow spend a lot of time at a karaoke night with wild dogs and with Stevie’s search for a physical hobby that she can tolerate instead. But I did enjoy the chemistry between Stevie and Shen, and I continued to laugh like a loon throughout.
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Badger to the Bone – 3.75 stars
When honey badger shifter Max is kidnapped by yet another mysterious group of mercenaries, she’s astonished to find among their number a jaguar shifter who doesn’t realize what he is.
After getting to know Max McKilligan in the previous two books, I wasn’t sure what kind of personality would be her match, but I knew it would require an interesting character to keep up with her. Luckily, Zé is more than up for the task. It was fun to see the more cat-like side of his personality slowly emerge over the course of the book. And I enjoyed how the plot surrounding the mess that is Freddy McKilligan was wrapped up, with a pretty hilarious reveal thrown in to boot.
I did feel like Max’s career as a professional basketball player and her team of honey badger friends felt written in specifically in this book and therefore come out of nowhere, but I expect you get used to them over the next couple of books. There’s also a bit more hanging around bit characters who pull up just to be thwarted by the sisters, and while the thwarting is fun we do lose pace on moving the plot forward in the meanwhile.
