Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved most of the books in this series. But this one was a no for me.

And one moment in particular—when he painfully no-lube finger banged her butt in a dingy prison and then she licked the “tangy” butt fingers afterwards—nearly broke me.

The story was trying to woo me with the butt stuff, buckets of 💦, and the 11 guy gang💥…

But I had too many entries in the Hate That column. 

▪️ There wasn’t much of a romance plot? (I kinda have a theory about this: I love this author’s anti-hero love interests—they take us in a journey—but her nice guy romances don’t go anywhere imo).

▪️ Our heroine didn’t have memories so her characterization was a mess.

▪️ The fated mates in here was annoyingly halfhearted. These aliens didn’t have fated mates (they were more about the gang💥) but our hero randomly experienced a mating call? It had all the instalove of fated mates, with none of the lovey-dovey feelings, which sucked.

▪️ Each book has been on a different planet and I usually love the alien cultures but this gladiator/space poker planet was lame.

▪️ Why did we even want that McGuffin-object anyways? Seriously. It was the whole plot but why did we care??

But the worst part: I couldn’t DNF it. Because the next couple’s book began in this book. In the first half. So it felt like DNFing this book meant DNFing the whole series and I wasn’t ready.

I still like the series overall, you just can’t win them all I guess.