Title: Hostage to Pleasure
Author: Nalini Singh
Series: Psy-Changeling #5, Psy-Changeling Season One #5
Rating Out of 5: 5 (I will read this again and again and again)
My Bookshelves: Dark fantasy, Paranormal romance, Shapeshifters
Pace: Fast
Format: Novel
Publisher: Gollancz
Year: 2008
5th sentence, 74th page: “Do it,” he whispered.
With her darkly seductive Psy-Changeling world, Nalini Singh has created a sensual, dangerous adventure that’s not to be missed. Now, as the deadly Psy Council tightens its grip, a rebel Psy scientist finds herself at the mercy of a changeling who has sworn vengeance against her kind…
Separated from her son and tasked to create a neural implant that will mean the effective enslavement of her psychically gifted race, Ashaya Aleine is the perfect Psy – calm, cool, emotionless… at least on the surface. Inside, she’s fighting a desperate battle to save her son and escape the vicious cold of the PsyNet. Yet when escape comes, it leads not to safety but to the lethal danger of a sniper’s embrace.
DarkRiver sniper Dorian Chistensen lost his sister to a Psy killer. Though he lacks the changeling ability to shift into animal form, his leopard lives within. And that leopard’s rage at the brutal loss is a clawing darkness that hungers for vengeance. Falling for a Psy has never been on Dorian’s agenda. But charged with protecting Ashaya and her son, he discovers that passion has a way of changing the rules…
Dorian’s stoic, supportive outlook and terrifyingly cold rage pulled me in from the first Psy-Changeling book. His loyalty to his Pack, and the outrageous pain that he felt at his sister’s loss create a stunning character, even when he is simply lurking at the periphery of other characters’ tales of love and loss. Which means that finally reading a story about the latent leopard and his mate was very rewarding, and I found the tale of Ashaya and Dorian impossible to put down.
Ashaya was one of the most intricately intense and confusing Psy characters which Singh has managed to create thus far. She is obviously driven by love for her son, hinted at in Mine to Possess, but she is hidden by layer upon layer of Silence and fear. Resulting in not an unemotional robot, as many of the Psy are shown to be, but in a woman who is steely and terrified, completely unsure of how to survive her new reality away from her people.
The potent mix of Ashaya’s fear and Dorian’s fury lead to a tale of twists and turns. Partnered with a sociopath and the slow revealing of more of the Psy Councils’ insidious plans and this is a story which has the power to draw you in and leave you in awe. After all, don’t we all want to be hostages to pleasure?
Earth and Skye 
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