I have been reading this series since it started, having stumbled on Katee Robert after Sarah MacLean recommended the first novella from her A Touch of Taboo series. As someone that enjoys Greek mythology, I am very much here for the reimagining of Olympus into a modern day city run by the 12.
As a result, even when I am less excited about any given pairing or grouping of love interests, the broader world politics and implications are still interesting. Still, the last few novels haven’t been nearly as enjoyable for me. Eurydice, Orpheus and Charon were fine but their involvement in the bigger picture centered around turning Ariadne as a spy. The last novel was Ariadne and the Minotaur, and those characters struggled to hold my interest for a large part of the novel. I just didn’t care about the Aeaen storyline/perspective even if they are a major threat to Olympus and I wanted to get back to the characters from Olympus, and their much more intricate webs.
With this, the final main Aeaen love character gets his story and life interest, and the series finally getsback to a story centered around not only one of the 12 (last one was book 5), but one of the main 3 (which hasn’t happened since book 1 with Hades). Picking up right where Dark Restraint left off, Icarus is now a prisoner to Poseidon, stranded in Olympus.
Poseidon is a very straightforward and honest person (as honest as one can be in the viper’s nest that is Olympus) with integrity and morals while Icarus has used sex as a means – a way to get information and power through blackmail material. The two fundamentally misunderstand each other’s motives but both feel attracted and comfortable around each other, and both have a history of complicated father figures in their past (Icarus’s actual father, Poseidon’s uncle). It’s all very sweetly done and while I definitely was more invested in them than Ariadne and Minotaur, I was just so happy to finally get some real developments from the Olympians and to see them interact and attempt to negotiate with each other while constantly looking for the backstabbing.
We see a bit more Hera and her most recent plots to kill her husband Zeus. The next novel is supposed to be the Hera/Zeus romance so I’m definitely curious to get behind the curtain on that relationship. So far, Hera has been portrayed as this no nonsense, takes no prisoners kind of attitude but I feel like even though we have had novels from 3 of her sisters, she is just a blank slate badass. I much prefer the glimpses and impressions we have had of Zeus so far, the beleaguered leader of a nation under siege, heir to a monster who is better than his father but also not taken as seriously and in circumstances that allow no room for error.
So basically, not my favorite of the series but a welcome and marked improvement over the most recent ones, both from the love interests, the political intrigue and progression of the main story line.