4⭐️.5🌶 I finished my ARC of Umbra by Catalina Matei last evening. It was okay. It is being marketed as book one of a new series. Now that I've read some other reviews, (I like to go in blind and don't read reviews prior to reading books usually.) This is more like book 4 in a series, which is why I felt so lost at first. We as readers are dumped into the thick of it twelve months after a pivitol event happens. Nearly the entire book is told in flash backs to catch us up to where we are. There is a bunch of info dumping and so much internal monolog. It wasn't difficult to follow necessarily but it was not a style of storytelling I'm used to that's for sure. It was difficult to connect with the characters as their grief felt more like whining because we weren't given a chance to connect with them emotionally. We were constantly being buffeted from the past back to the present. The bulk of the story was depressing as ...
5⭐️4🌶 I finished listening to Waiting for Him by Samantha Cole. I loved this one! I thought the spice and thriller plot lines were much more balanced. They were interwoven in this book and the switch back and forth was seamless and logical to the overall plot. Kat quite literally comes back from the dead. She and her family had been involved in a car accident 12 years prior to the beginning of the book. Ben "Boomer" thought her entire family had died. What in fact happened is her mother and brother had died in the accident, but she and her father had lived. That accident was actually a hit by the Russian mob her father had gotten himself involved with. Her and her father were put in witness protection and they had been living on the west coast under assumed names. Kat's father had passed away a few months ago. When her apartment was broken into and she thought she was being followed she turned to the only per...