Reviewed by Anabela.m
TITLE: Fractured Souls
SERIES: Fallen Messengers Book 1
AUTHOR: Ava Marie Salinger
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 264 pages
RELEASE DATE: July 16,2021
BLURB:
Humans are dying in San Francisco. The most shunned angel on Earth may very well hold the key as to why…
When Cassius Black moves to San Francisco for a fresh start, the angel’s hopes of staying below the radar of the supernatural organizations that oversee the otherworldly and magic users in the city are dashed when he stumbles across a dead body in the sewers. His grim discovery soon puts him in the sights of the Argonaut Agency and Francis Strickland, the bureau director who knows his darkest secrets.
Morgan King and his team of Argonaut agents have been on the hunt all summer for the culprits behind a series of gruesome killings that have rocked the city. Killings that bear sinister hallmarks of human sacrificial rituals where the victims’ souls have been stolen. When Fate puts Cassius in Morgan’s path, he realizes the angel everyone likes to call The Devil may very well be the only person who can help them track down the murderers.
Morgan and Cassius soon find themselves chasing down a sect of black-magic sorcerers and crossing paths with a mysterious warlock whose actions evoke disturbing echoes of an incident from Cassius’s past. As rumors of a potential plot to tear open the Nether reach their ears, Cassius and Morgan must work together to defeat their common enemy and save the city from destruction, all while fighting their growing attraction for one another.
Fractured Souls is the first novel in the MM urban fantasy series Fallen Messengers. If you like action-packed paranormal adventures with romance and snark, then grab this pulse-pounding book today and enter a world you won’t want to leave!
REVIEW:
I want to start this review with saying that I’m not by any means an expert on urban fantasy, so I can’t really critique on how complete the world building is. For me, though, Ava Marie Sallinger has put together a complex world and plot, and characters that were all widely described and developed. There were a lot of creatures in this story, mages, warlocks, angels and demons, potions and magic weapons. It helped that the author offered a glossary at the beginning of the book.
Five hundred years ago the Nether tore open and angels, demons and all kinds of ‘otherworldly’ creatures fell to Earth, crashing without any memories of their previous lives. Their arrival caused the awakening, so to speak, of magical abilities in some humans, hence the existence of different kind of magic users. And, while all angels and demons were wielders of an element, there was one exception: Cassius. He was an angel different from all, an one of a kind creature hated and despised by all, whose full range of abilities and were presented bit by bit throughout the book. Cassius was also the one sent by any law enforcement agencies when ‘difficult’ situations arose, sort of their super powerful solve-it-all.
The beginning of Fractured Souls, though, had Cassius working as a lone PI, searching for a lost cat in the city’s sewers. He found the cat (of the demonnic variety, it turned out), but he also stumbled upon a mutilated body of a man, obviously killed during a ritual. A few hours later, Cassius met Morgan, and not before long he also got involved in the investigation regarding a series of murders caused by dark magic.
I think Fractured Souls is written mostly in such way to build the setting for the future books in the series. On one side, it introduced Cassius, Morgan, the Argonaut team and the most important players of the world, and on the other side, I felt like it only gave Cassius and Morgan the chance to reacquaint physically. I lost count of the times the story was put on hold just that the two of them could get naked. They fought one moment and had sex the next, and, although they both said they felt like their souls were deeply connected, it wasn’t a bond that really reached me from the pages. I did like them together, though. Their banter was fun and their chemistry was beyond incendiary.
The secondary characters were interesting and fun, especially Loki, the demon cat. And, thanks to the vividly descriptive storytelling, it was easy to imagine the gruesome crime scenes, the physical allure of angels and demons, or feel the razor edge danger when fights happened. The plot was intriguing and fast paced, and I was constantly holding my breath waiting for the next thing to happen. I was thrown into this dark and scary world where humans were killed by a seemingly unstoppable villain…nail biting stuff! Hopefully in the next book the good will prevail against evil. Can’t wait!
RATING: 
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