When it rains, it pours, and Violet Maxwell must be in a monsoon.  Bound by ancient Supernatural law to find a mate, she's struck a bargain with her least favorite person to fake-date until they can each find a loophole in the rules: Lincoln Thorne, wolf shifter, leader of the North American Pack, and the guy who broke her heart almost fifteen years ago.  Oh, and maybe the magic she's spent the last thirty two years thinking she doesn't have has finally shown up.  Suddenly Violet and Linc aren't just pretending to date: they're also trying to keep her magic a secret until she can control it and sidestep power-hungry shifters desperate to thwart Lincoln's reforms.  If the two of them can't work together and heal old hurts, whatever's sparking between them could zap itself right out of existence.

This was so super fun - the kind of paranormal, second chance, hate to love romance I was looking for last year and didn't get.  It's a really refreshing take on the shifter/paranormal world too; shifter/fated mates books can lean really hard into Alpha energy which can get into some toxic masculinity real fast.  Lincoln is an absolute cinnamon roll, working to make the shifter community more egalitarian and totally willing to throw on some cat ears and eyeliner whiskers to make a group of kids laugh.  His relationship with his second is great, full of support and understanding.  Violet's a great foil, too, not awed by his power and ready to poke fun at him like she did when they were kids.  

The beginning of the book is rocky, with a lot of info-dumping and not a lot of world-building (a tough combo to achieve, but here we are).  I thought for a minute that I'd missed the first book in the series, but it's just weird.  It's a world where the Supernatural and the Norms coexist with full knowledge of each other, and there's some allusions to, like, anti-Supernatural discrimination in the past that never gets fleshed out.  A single paragraph of background information somewhere in the first few pages would have gone a long way.  The writing could also use a little more polishing.

I really loved this book, and the wide paranormal world that Asher is starting to create.  I can't pick which character I'd like to read about next because each of them seems like so much fun, but I'm definitely looking forward to whoever it is!

Thank you to St. Martin's and NetGalley for the ARC!

CW:

abusive parent (remembered with few details on the page), the partner of a non-narrative character seems, to me, at least manipulative and perhaps abusive