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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Key to Conflict - Talia Gryphon, 18 Dec 2007
Sometimes you hear about a book so awful, so badly written, so freaking unbelieably poor plotted, you just have to read it for yourself.
Gillian Key is a Marine Corp captain, a world-renowned paramortal psychologist and the prettiest darn thing you ever did see. On the pretense of treating a four-hundred-year old vampire with depression, she's undercover in Romania scoping out information on Dracula, who may or may not be about to wage war on humanity. Unfortunately, Gillian is having trouble respecting the client-doctor boundary because, naturally, her patient, Alecksei, is intolerably sexy. As is his brother, Tanis. As is the ghost she's treating for post-traumatic-stress syndrome.
Gillian is a first class Mary Sue. She's blonde, green-eyed, curvy, intelligent, fierce, a decorated battle vet and a fantastic lover. Every man who meets her immediately decides to bed her. I can't imagine why they would, personally. If she's not yelling at her patients or fighting with their families, she's on her tiptoes screaming that she's a Marine, dammit! and doesn't need anyone to look after her. She's also a violent bully who takes issue with pretty much everything anyone says to her. She's like Scrappy Doo - forever picking fights with people far stronger than her and getting away with it because she's just too darn cute! The men she meets simply melt into goo when she does something stupid, because she's so brave to do it! And also cute!
Secondary characters are inconsistent in their behaviour - Tanis, for example starts the book as a growling neanderthal who believes it's his God-given right to spank women to "put them in their place," but ends it as a tender-hearted wuvbunny after a magical encounter with Gillian's swamplike nether regions. Dracula, plugged throughout as the World's Greatest Evil, appears for one paragraph and spends it drooling over Gillian. Other characters are simply there to admire her, even when she's being a completely unreasonable cow.
Realistic behaviour takes a back seat too. Despite Gillian's frequent reminders that she's a marine and a world-famous psychologist, she never behaves with a soldier's discipline or a psychologist's intelligence. I have something of a military background, and if a soldier spoke to their commanding officer the way Gillian speaks to hers, they'd be court-martialled faster than you can say "Private Benjamin." Another issue is the question of time-scale. The book purportedly takes place over the course of a year, yet weeks and months are skipped over and it seems to be perpetually autumn no matter how much time passes, giving the book a disjointed feel.
Editing and grammar are poor (that's probably not a surprise, given that Gryphon is a protege of Laurell K Hamilton), and missing commas wreck havoc on the setence structure throughout. Info-dumping wastes huge swathes of paper that could be happily pumping oxygen into the atmosphere as a tree somewhere. Gryphon is apparently convinced that, unless she reiterates it every other page, the reader might forget Gillian's profession, hair colour, eye colour and bra size.
In conclusion, awkwardly-written, ill-contrived and unintentionally hilarious in places, this is a book that fans of the new LKH books will lap up. Everyone else, I wouldn't bother if I were you.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An engaging debut, 1 Oct 2007
'Meet Gillian Key. She's a Paramortal psychologist who can treat the mental distress of nonhumans. And she's a Marine Special Forces operative who can get physical with them when the situation calls for it...
Gillian's two worlds collide when she travels to the Carpathian Mountains in Romania to counsel the local master vampire, Count Aleksei Rachlav. His therapy serves as the perfect cover for her special ops mission: to infiltrate local vampire factions who may be allied with Rachlav's enemy-the legendary Dracula. As a brewing turf war between those who see them as food begins to rock the paramortal realm, Gillian finds herself caught in the middle-and at the mercy of her dangerously attractive host. Her professional ethics tell her to keep her distance, but besides being both a healer and a fighter, Gillian Key is also very much a woman...'
'Key to Conflict' is the first novel in the interesting Gillian Key Series.
I have rated this novel as four stars, however throughout the book the stars vere from three to a four and a half rating-and a five stars towards the end. The plot is gripping and extremely interesting (especially the Egyptian angle). With the introduction of more characters, the book comes more into it's own and the dynamic between all the characters finds a better balance. I found it interesting once I had gotten my head around the monologue/history updates-esq paragraphs. I initially found this novel difficult to get into, due to the heroines (and others) seemingly constant and contradictory behaviour/emotions/attributes, however I found myself intrigued by the new world that was being depicted and I am glad I read it. By the end of this novel, I was interested to find out what happens next and grew to like the characters. Not the best start to a series, but with great intriguing moments the sequel can only be better.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Promising..., 24 Oct 2007
This is a promising new entrant into the SF genre, although I would have to say that there are remarkable parallels between this book and the Anita Blake series by Laurell K Hamilton. In fact, the author mentions Laurell several times during the book.
The premise is promising, and could be something that develops well. I just hope that it will not be a copycat series. Don't get me wrong, I love Laurell's books and have all of them, but I think that individuality is key to a successful series. Saying that, if there is another in this series, I would buy it to read.
I enjoyed it, but felt that parts of the book could have been better put together.
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