This was an okay instalment. The first three quarters of the book were pretty average but the end was a great climatic scene. Be warned it has one stinker of a cliffhanger. You're going to want to have the next one in hand. To be honest, if it were not for nearly every book so far ending in some kind of cliffhanger, I might have walked away from this series by now. There's nothing wrong with it, exactly, but it doesn't rock my world by any stretch of the imagination. This cliffhanger ploy is something that's definitely starting to aggravate.Allie's character still isn't the badass I want her to be. For someone that has the unique ability to channel as much magic as she wants you'd think she'd be more helpful in a crisis, but as far as I can tell, whenever there's a dangerous situation, Allie is more of a liability than anything else. She either just rushes in half cocked and gets in the way, or she has a Too Stupid To Live moment and makes everything worse.The romance element is still only luke warm for me, too, but its definitely better in this book. It's nice to see Zayvion training Allie to better defend herself. This should help with the above. The most interesting thing at the moment for me is the subplot between Shane, the lovable, if slightly annoying, Irish rogue, and a blast from his past that turns up by the name of Terric. There is some question as to whether or not the two are soul complements. Something that both are uncomfortable with as it usually is something that that happens between a male and female pair and can be a highly pleasurable thing to experience during sex. So for two straight guys? Well they react pretty much as you'd expect them to react. They try and out-man each other and piss each other off as much as possible rather than deal with it like a grown up.I am going to read the next one ('cause of the dang blasted cliffhanger) but it's with reservation. I really hope for an improvement in this series, or I'm out.Originally Reviewed for Urban Fantasy Book Reviewshttp://urbanfantasybookreviews.blogspot.com/