Review: They Call Me Death - Missy Jane

Humans are no longer at the top of the food chain...

My name is Alexia Williams.  In my world, North America is divided between north and south - but not in the way it's taught in the history books.

After losing my family to shifters, I joined the Combined Human States Army.  Now I find myself on the front lines, defending the wall between my species and theirs.  My mission is simple: keep the animals on their side by whatever means necessary - and I'm good at it.  I don't talk to them, I don't sympathise with them.  I sure as hell don't admire them...until one saves my life.

Andor isn't like any other shifter I've ever met.  He's a three-hundred-year-old golden eagle asking for help finding missing shifters who may be in my lands.  I just have to decide between helping the animals or ignoring the signs that my fellow humans aren't what I thought they were.  But how can I help a species I hate and fear?  Even if Andor makes me feel alive again?

In the land of shifters...they call me Death.

Visit Missy Jane's website for more information

Review:
I feel like this book had a lot of potential but it didn't quite manage to live up to my expectations.  I was really curious about a story where shifters have revealed themselves to the public but did so as an act of war and aren't trying to live happily alongside humans.  Unfortunately I was left with a lot of questions - why did they start the war?  What happened to make them so anti-human?  If they had such obvious physical differences (Alexia points out several times that she can easily spot shifters) then how did they remain hidden for so long?  If these questions had been answered They Call Me Death would have been a much more satisfying read.

I also found myself a bit disappointed with Alexis, with a title like They Call Me Death I was expecting a heroine who could stand up for herself.  This expectation was only raised by the warning on the back cover "If you are easily intimidated by kick-ass heroines who can hold their own against alpha males and bring them to their knees, this book is not for you!".  Alexis spends a lot of time telling you she is kick-ass, she certainly acts like she must be when surrounded by her male army colleagues but when it comes down to it she fails to deliver.  The one time we see her kill a shifter (even though it is in self defense) she breaks down and is horrified by her actions, hardly what I would expect from someone who has killed so many shifters that they actually refer to her as Death.

At first it was easy to feel for her, you discover in the prologue that both her husband and her son were killed by shifters when the war first began.  It is easy to see why she would hate shifters and want revenge, her world was turned upside down and she reacted in a way that I think most people would wish they could.  That just made it harder to believe the complete turnaround she makes when she first meets Andor, she lets him in far too quickly and it just didn't fit with what we knew of her personality.  This just made their relationship completely unbelievable and I struggled to feel the connection between them.

The plot itself was fairly thin, shifters have been going missing and Andor is trying to find out what is happening to them.  He comes to Alexis for help but it was never really clear why he needed her, I didn't see any evidence of her being particularly useful in the investigation.  The two of them spend a lot of time running and hiding, the author skips chunks of time without making it clear what they had been doing during the gaps and the showdowns they do have with their enemies were mostly over too quickly with very little drama.

I had high expectations for this book but unfortunately it failed to deliver and I would struggle to recommend this when there are so many fantastic urban fantasy series out there.

Source: Won from StoryWings, thanks Amanda

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