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?

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Title: Mine to Possess
Author: Nalini Singh
Series: Psy-Changeling #4, Psy-Changeling Season One #4
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: 2007
5th sentence, 74th page: Now she gathered up Talin’s self-hatred, revulsion, and anger – such incredible anger – in her psychic arms and absorbed it inside of herself.

Nalini Singh pulls away another dark layer of sheer desire, revealing passions unknown, in her latest novel about the world of the Psy. A ghost returns from a leopard changeling’s past, making him question everything – even his base animal instincts…

Clay Bennett is a powerful DarkRiver sentinel, but he grew up in the slums with his human mother, never knowing his changeling father. As a young boy without the bonds of Pack he tried to stifle his animal nature. He failed… and committed the most extreme act of violence, killing a man and losing his best friend, Talin, in the bloody aftermath. Everything good in him died the day he was told that she, too, was dead.

Talin McKade barely survived a childhood drenched in bloodshed and terror. Now a new nightmare is stalking her life – the street children she works to protect are disappearing and turning up dead. Determined to keep them safe, she unlocks the darkest secret in her heat, and steels herself to ask the help of the strongest man she knows…

Clay lost Talin once. He will not let her go again, his hunger to possess her is a clawing need born of the leopard within. As they race to save the innocent, Clay and Talin must face the violent truths of their past, or risk losing everything that ever mattered.

This by far is my favourite Psy-Changeling book so far. The idea of loving someone since you were a child and never wanting to let them go is the epitome of soul mates and childhood sweethearts. Not something that I could ever truly conceive, but in the pages of a book, it is very sweet. Not to mention the sense of loyalty that jumps off the pages, and for me, loyalty and faith in one another are huge cornerstones in any good relationship.

Not to say that this love story was an easy journey – it was anything but. Singh likes to have her characters run the gauntlet in their pursuit of their mates, and it was no different for Clay and Tally. Forced to face their complex pasts while racing to save lost children, they are forced to come to terms with both who they are, and what they have done.

This is the first book in the Psy-Changeling series that ends on a bit more of a cliff-hanger, introducing characters that we will get to know much more intimately within the next novel, Hostage to Pleasure. As the series continues, the tantalising simplicity of the love stories becomes more heavily embroiled in a far greater battle between emotions and calculation, one that I, personally can’t wait to keep immersing myself within.

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