Kristina Douglas
ISBN #: 978-1-4391-9192-7
Publisher Name: Pocket Books
Date Released: February 2011
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Book Format: Print

BACK COVER BLURB:

She was just an ordinary mortal . . .

“You’re dead” is so not what Allie Watson wants to hear. Unfortunately, it explains a lit. Like the dark, angelically handsome man who ferried her to this strange, hidden land. The last thing she remembers is stepping off a curb in front of a crosstown bus. Now she’s surrounded by gorgeous fallen angels with an unsettling taste for blood – and they really don’t want her around. Not exactly how she pictured heaven.

. . . Until death catapulted her into a seductive world she never imagined.

Raziel is unsure why he rescued Allie from hellfire against Uriel’s orders, but she stirs in him a longing he hasn’t felt in centuries. Now the Fallen are bracing for the divine wrath brought by his disobedience, and they blame Allie for the ferocious Nephilim clawing at the kingdom’s shrouded gates. Facing impossible odds at every turn, the two must work together to survive. Raziel will do anything to defend his spirited lover against the forces of darkness – because Allie may be the Fallen’s only salvation.

COVER SNARK:

The cover is interesting and drew me to pick it up in the bookstore. However, I was annoyed when I first started reading because the heroine makes it feel as if it’s a light paranormal with a ditzy heroine and when I’m in the mood to read those I need a cartoon cover, not a cover that makes it feel as it’s a dark paranormal.

FIRST LINES:

I am Raziel, one of the twenty fallen angels spoken of by Enoch in the old books. I live in the hidden world of Sheol, with the other Fallen, where no one knows of our existence, and we have lived that way since the fall, millennia ago.

RAZIEL pulled me in right away. I loved the writing and the author’s voice. So upon first reading RAZIEL I thought I was going to love it and not be able to put the book down. Then I met the heroine Allie. I don’t know what’s been up with me or the books that I’ve been reading lately, but the heroines in the last couple books that I have read have got on my last nerve. Allie, the heroine of RAZIEL was no exception.

At first, I assumed that I had strong feelings against Allie because she had the ditzy heroine feel that I associated with light paranormal romances and I wasn’t in the mood for a light paranormal romance, but the more I read, the more I realized that nope, Allie just got on my freaking nerves. I’ll do my best to explain why.

Allie and Raziel meet when Raziel is tasked to escort her to her next life when she dies. However, when Raziel sees that she’s going to hell instead of heaven, he pulls her back from eternal damnation and takes her to the secret isle where the fallen have been hidden since the dawn of time.

What I didn’t get is that Allie accepts that she’s dead, but she cannot accept anything else that is going on around her. Not only does she not accept what’s going on around her, she acts like a complete moron about it. She’s dead, her body was cremated and she seems to think that she can leave and go about her life like nothing happened? HUH? It also annoyed me that she knew nothing that was going on and she acted like she had all the answers and wouldn’t shut her mouth when people who had the knowledge tried to give her the answers and she wouldn’t listen to them. That drove me batty.

Another aspect of RAZIEL that bothered me was Raziel and the other fallen angels believe with good reason that she was sent to them do infiltrate their secret hiding place and destroy them. While the reasons for their suspicions were written in a very believable matter, the solution bugged me. The solution involved mind rape and a seduction that involved the heroine saying no and the hero convincing her otherwise, to put it delicately. I was also disturbed that Allie annoyed me so much that mind rape and seduction didn’t annoy me as much as it should’ve.

Allie however seemed to become less annoying when she and Raziel had sex. Yes, the woman in me found that while I was glad Allie gained some sense, it bothered me that she had to be ‘tamed’ so to speak to get there.

Once the hormones got out of the way, RAZIEL really picked up and I enjoyed it very much. I loved the beginning and the end of RAZIEL and I especially loved the world that Ms. Douglas built for her characters. I would definitely read the next book in the series.

WHERE PURCHASED:
Bought with my own money.

RATING: