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The Bargain Nexus - Into the Flame (Darkness Chosen, Book 4)
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List Price: $7.99
Our Price: $1.50
Your Save: $ 6.49 ( 81% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Signet
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780451224668
ISBN: 0451224663
Label: Signet
Manufacturer: Signet
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2008-08-05
Publisher: Signet
Studio: Signet
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Loved it
Comment: The Darkness Chosen series is a fantastic read. I couldn't put these four books down. Hot sizzling romance, love of family, and great action/adventure scenes. I highly recommend getting them: Scent of Darkness, Touch of Darkness, Into the Shadow, Into the Flame. Christina Dodd is a wonderful author. I've only read a few of her books, and I loved every one of them!
Customer Rating:
Summary: I REALLY didn't like this story!
Comment: **Spoilers**
This is the fourth book out of the Darkness Chosen series and my first by Ms. Dodd. I don't think I realized it was the fourth book in the series when I bought it. (I hate reading a new story in the middle of a series, or in this case, the end?) Although I probably would have bought it anyway because of J.R.'s endorsement on the back. (I'm really going to stop reading books she endorsed; I'm tired of getting burned.) I did not read the first three books in the series, but was able to figure out what was going on pretty quickly. Ms. Dodd did do a good job of providing history on the Wilder family.
Firebird is the fourth child of the Wilder family. The only girl in a family of boys...even though it was prophesied that the family would only birth boys. Well, come to find out, she really wasn't the Wilder's daughter. She was switched at birth with a male infant. This male infant was later left in the Nevada desert.
But as fate would have it, she later meets this male child at college, (Douglas)and he becomes the father of her son, Aleksandr. Confusing...not really, but still vaguely unsettling. I can see why people would think it sounds slightly incestuous, even though he and Firebird are not related. I think that Ms. Dodd could have arranged that situation a little better. Be that as it may, Firebird's and Doug's road to their very own HEA was riddled with betrayals, major evil and just plain silliness. However, their one true constant was love.
Final word: I did NOT like this story. Besides a general "ickiness" of their situation, I didn't really engage in the plot. It was kind of creepy (even more creepier than my usual beloved paranormals) and in some parts just plain stupid. For example, the final battle between Wilders and Varinskis was just silly, and made absolutely no sense to me.
Throughout the story, we're constantly being told how shrewd, smart and clever Konstantine Wilder is. Yet he goes into a battle with HUNDREDS of shapeshifters like himself, with nothing but himself, four women, his three, oh sorry, four sons, and a baby. How did he expect to win against those odds? Couldn't he have hired an army for himself? And, it seems that even Ms. Dodd realized how ridiculous this scenario was. Later she throws in this unknown, unheard of, Romany army to fight on their side. Even more sillier was what happened after the Wilders and Varinskis lost their shapeshifting abilities in the battle. The Varinskis ran away because they didn't know how to fight in human form. HUH?? They outnumbered the Wilders. They could have just jumped them and still beaten them.
It was silly. And that, plus other glaring plot holes, left this story almost crazily unreadable. Luckily, Ms. Dodd does have a strong writing style, which was probably the only reason anyone gave this book 5 stars. That is the only reason, I will give her another chance. But it won't be with the Wilders. I have absolutely NO desire to read the previous books in that series.
I would only read this book, if you've invested time in this series. Otherwise, it isn't worth your time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: B, Incestuous Possibilities
Comment: Don't get me wrong, the book wasn't a bad read.
Quick synopsis:
Varinski family damned to superhuman abilities to shapeshift into particular animals until they break the curse of reuniting 4 icons of the Virgin Mary. One descendant breaks off because he finds love with a Gypsy seer, moves to America, changes his last name to Wilder and tries to live a just life in hopes of finding favor with God. The Varinski family vows to hunt him down & kill him.
His wife, being a gypsy seer, once in a while will trance out and foretell a prediction. She predicted the fall of the Varinski family. She predicts that 4 sons will find the icons with their true loves, reunite the family icon and break the curse. Thing is, the woman has 3 sons and 1 daughter (who is an anomaly as the Varinski curse only allows sons to be born).
So the 3 older sons have found their true loves and each brought a piece of the icon. The 4th child, the daughter, "Firebird" (who is named after a Russian story, but on a personal note...I think the name is lame) comes home from college knocked up. She bears a son and she won't tell the parents anything about the father, Doug Black. She had left college because she accidentally caught him shapeshifting into a cougar and she believed him to be after her family to kill them as he must be one of those evil Varinskis.
Turns out Doug Black was an orphan found in the desert. He figured out he was related to the Varinksis and contacted the evil ones in order to help him track Firebird down. Ooops! Big boo-boo.
Anyhow Doug has been searching for his birth family his whole life. Which explains how he got into police work as he believed his role would allow him access to certain information not readily available to the public. He wants to track his family down and make them pay for dumping him.
Then he finds Firebird. His birth family's daughter. He falls in love with her and starts doing the nasty with her. HELLO?!!! Am I the only one who noticed he could be sleeping with his sister? He has NO idea that she's not the biological daughter of his parents, but he sleeps with her anyways.
This is the biggest flaw with this book. Sad that something so obvious was missed, but had it been written in that he somehow knew she wasn't their biological daughter, I would have rated this book higher.
In the end, turns out the Devil made someone else switch Doug with Firebird at birth. So, sleeping with your sister who isn't really your sister is ok I guess.
"Into the Shadows" was a better book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Into the flame
Comment: this a great book if you havent read the other in (darkness Chosen) read them before you read this one........
Customer Rating:
Summary: major disappointment
Comment: I thought the second and third book was great. Especially the third with Adrik, so I was very excited about reading Firebird's story. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting to read Firebird's story. Where did she come from? Where did she get these unusual abilities? Etc. Apparently Dodd didn't think these things were important to the storyline. What she did think was important was forcing the reader into endless corny battle strategies between Konstantine and his family and the continuous lamentations of the family commenting on how much they love each other. Okay....snore! The goofy women boding and the thirty-something men's constant wrestling on the floor was juvenile and unrealistic.
The hero, Douglas, had sooo much potential and yet she did not develop his character one iota. For someone who spent all his youth trying and wanting to find his family, once he met them, he gave little to no attention to them. Dodd even describes Douglas as silent and unsocial.
*Sigh* An overall disappointment!
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Editorial Reviews:
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meet Doug Black—the Wilder brother who’s been missing for centuries. With no idea of where he’s from, he’s become an angry young cop with the ability to transform into a cougar. in search of others like him, he comes across a beautiful woman who may hold the secret to his destiny...
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