Reviewed by Carissa

TITLE:  Where There’s Fire

SERIES:  Panopolis #2

AUTHOR:  Cari Z

PUBLISHER:  Riptide Publishing

LENGTH:  113 pages

BLURB:  

Making a name for myself as a Villain in Panopolis is hard work. Six months ago, my boyfriend broke me out of jail. Now he’s spending most of his time defending our turf against other Villains he accidentally freed along with me. And my new psychic powers are not only impossible to control, but they’re also giving me migraines.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. My skills are improving every day, and Raul—aka the Mad Bombardier—and I have never been happier. That is, until my first solo job is interrupted by a mysterious woman who tells me that Raul has been kidnapped by a ruthless new Villain. The only way to free him is to do a job for Maggot, a man with scary ideas and an even scarier superpower.

I can’t go to the cops or a Hero for help. Odds are they wouldn’t listen to me anyway. If I fail, Raul will be killed. If I succeed, we’ll both be bound to a man who’ll stop at nothing to put Panopolis on the path to civil war.

It looks like the only way to win is to take out the competition.

REVIEW:  

Learning to control his reverse-empathy powers–courtesy of a mad-scientist’s mad science–means more than a few headaches for Edward Dinges. Luckily he has his boyfriend to help smooth out the edges, where he can. But being the new villain on the block is not all fun and games, and soon Edward is snared in the trap of one of the bigger players on the villain/hero playing field. To save his lover, and to stop a madman, Edward will just have to hope his crash-course in villainy is enough to get him and Raul thru the day.

I’m so glad I didn’t have to wait very long to read the sequel to Where There’s Smoke, because when we last left Edward and Raul, they were going thru some pretty big changes. Well, Edward was. Raul was still going along with his bad-ass self. But now that Edward is all villain-ed up, I figured that life was going to rather interesting for the two. And boy was I right.

There isn’t a lot of happy, fluffy, sex-times in this story (except for at the beginning) since life quickly takes a turn of the OMG! Why would you do that?!!, pretty fast. But Raul and Edward as just as awesome together as they were in book one. Probably even more awesome since Things Happen and they still are totally in this together.

And Things Will Happen. Not pretty/nice things, either. Be prepared.  I didn’t see that coming (bad joke) and while I think it was awesome for the story and all, it made me sad. And a little bit wrathful.

The bad guys so deserved what they got.

There are a lot of fun gadgets, a lot of things catching on fire, lots of things happening which make this story really great. And man is book three going to be pretty dang cool. If there is a book three–I’m assuming there is, because if there is not, I will cry.

You should totally pick up the first book in the series before you read this one, but other than that, I give all the recommendations to this book. I’m having a lot of fun reading about the dark-side of Panopolis.

RATING:

BUY LINKS:

Riptide

Amazon  

ARe