Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Placeless
SERIES: Bay Wolves #2
AUTHOR: Vivien Dean
PUBLISHER: Amber Allure
LENGTH: 125 pages
BLURB:
Keaton McGrath had been a werewolf for only a few weeks when he was kidnapped and put into service for anyone willing to pay for his company. Now, a year later and rescued from that life, he’s trying to figure out how to be both human and wolf in a world that doesn’t want him. His only escapes are nightly runs, a chance to let loose the energy of the animal within, but when one of those runs ends with him finding a hurt girl in the park, he can’t control his wolf’s fury when he smells her attacker nearby.
Barely keeping himself from killing the man, Keaton calls 911, then leaves before he can get linked to the crime scene. His hopes to remain anonymous are dashed when Scotty Trumbauer, a local blogger and independent wolf activist, finds him out. Though Keaton’s warned that Scotty is bad news, the chemistry between them is too powerful to ignore, especially when Scotty leaps to defend him.
Keaton just wants to do the right thing without putting the people he cares about in danger. He has to learn, however, that a wolf is stronger when he’s not alone…
REVIEW:
I really need to learn to look at series numbers before I pick up books for review. Luckily for me this one did a decent job of standing alone as a novel, but it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time I went into a book blind and came out completely bewildered. And while I didn’t get too lost in this book, I really do think that I would have been better off having read the first book in this series–if only to get a better grasp of the world that is built up here. I do like reading stories where everyone knows about shifters, though. So while I was a little confused as to who knew what, for the first few scenes, it quickly slotted into place–at least enough that I got the general picture.
From what I can gather this books picks up some time after the events of the first story, Boundless, though with a new MC. Keaton was rescued–along with a handful of other shifters–from being held as a sex slave by some pretty nasty people. And while he is grateful now to be free, he knows very little about how to be a wolf. Especially a wolf in a society that fears, shuns, and wishes to control the moves and lives of all shifters. So when he is running early one morning and comes across a woman getting attacked in the park, part of him really just want to run in the other direction. Helping can only bring danger back into his life. But another part of him knows that if it had been him screaming he would have wanted someone to come to his rescue. So he does. And lands himself right smack-dab in the middle of a police investigation…and the sights of the overzealous–if well meaning–blogger/wolf-rights crusader, Scotty Trumbauer. The extremely hot, overzealous, blogger/wolf crusader. Yeah, Keaton could never do life the easy way.
For all the dark background that is Keaton’s past, this book was fairly lighthearted. Yeah it deals with some pretty serious issues, but it never really got all that angsty. Granted, the lack of angst was a bit of an issue since I never really felt any of the repercussions of Keaton’s time being sold for sex. I can’t really make up my mind whether the lighthearted feel was a good or a bad thing, though. I don’t particularly enjoy overly angsty books (and really, I spent the last three days crying over the most ridiculous things in some of the stories I read, so not crying was a bit of a relief) but the blasé way that Keaton treated his captivity kinda shut him off from me as a character. I guess I kept expecting him to feel something. There were a few moments of ptsd shown to us, but I never felt it.
That being said…I found myself enjoying this book. The world was interesting, and I really like seeing how authors choose to integrate shifters into human societies. I don’t know what it says about our culture that us humans almost always come out looking like massive twats, but I really can’t fault the logic of it (but then again, I’m still ticked off about the latest elections and am rocking some pretty strong misanthropy right now). Reading the first book probably would have helped a lot here, though (with understanding the world, not my desire to set up a tent on the moon), because I definitely felt like there were some things you were just supposed to get from the first book, here, that I didn’t really. I had to piece it together from a few random comments, and that came to be frustrating after a bit. That’s my fault for not actually paying attention to series order, though.
So, if you are looking for a lighthearted shifter novel with some hot sexing and some clueless bumbling of men in love, I can recommend this book. Just maybe pick up the first one first. Or not. It’s totally up to you.
RATING: 
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