When I reviewed Elizabeth Stephens’s first book in the Supers in the City series, All Superheroes Need PR, I started off “Hinges? I don’t know her” – Elizabeth Stephens, probably. Well, in All Superheroes Need Photo Ops, Stephens proves that she knows exactly what a hinge is and she enjoys listening to them swing wildly in the wind. Stephens obviously knows how hinges work, because she knows exactly how and when to take them off and throw them away.
Before Roland reverted to his alien form in All Superheroes Need PR, Taranis was the most popular superhero, but now he is, at best, second. Taranis is not the civic-minded, smiling-faced hero that he has presented to the world. He’s a villain and he’s more than happy to take away some of the people he thinks are making Roland look good, like Monika, the photo journalist under contract with Roland’s team. Monika is smart, but she has a couple of weaknesses, Taranis and boredom. After she is temporarily bamboozled into working for him and fake dating him, she finds the extent of Taranis’s villainy. Knowing that he would leave her for dead doesn’t reduce her attraction to him. One of the things that I loved about this book is that Monika is never unintelligent. She is occasionally stupid and it’s the kind of stupid that people do when their hormones overcome their good sense. She was wondering right along with me what the h e l l she was thinking.
I really need to dive into Stephens’s backlist. I spent the entirety of this book in awe of how well she makes some of my least favorite tropes work. I don’t usually like a number of the elements and tropes in All Superheroes Need Photo Ops – humiliation kink, knotting, morality chain, and such. Stephens makes it all work. Taranis is a genuine monster, which again, not my usual preference. When Taranis decides he cares about Monika, he doesn’t stop being a villain, but he does become a more interesting monster. I’m really interested to see where Stephens is going with this series, because she’s generating questions about how we define heroes and villains.
I received this as an advance reader copy from Montlake and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.