Review: Lethal Game

Lethal Game by Christine Feehan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

The sixteenth installment of the Ghostwalkers series, Lethal Game was full of enhanced super soldiers, political plots, family, and love. Some would say I have no business jumping into a series at #16, and they could be right, but when I read the synopsis I was intrigued and wanted to give the story a chance. The author does a great job of informing any new readers to the backstory of Ghostwalkers, scientifically enhanced soldiers, without info dumping. I was completely locked in when the story started off with Air Force para-rescuers, Malichai and Rubin, set down in the mountains of Afghanistan as they help rescue a group of injured soldiers pinned down. Malichai and Rubin's powers are revealed as they telepathically speak to each other and have super strength and speed. Malichai ends up getting grievously injured and is forced to take some vacation time, this is when he meets our heroine. 

 He was dangerous to her in more ways than was good for either of them. 

Amaryllis is also a Ghostwalker, one that escaped from Dr. Whitney (the mad scientists behind enhancing humans) and is on the run. When Malichai ends up staying at the bed and breakfast she is currently working at, they both sense something in the other. Their attraction was instant and although they both were a little wary, it was around the 30% mark that these two were pretty much already together. I missed more of an emotional growing attraction and some of the push/pull that can happen. Along with Amaryllis being on the run from Whitney and an enhanced soldier named Owen that feels Amaryllis needs to be punished for showing him up, Malichai and Amaryllis seem to have stumbled upon a planned terrorist attack that is headed by individuals in their own American government. I thought this plot was completely unneeded as it confused and clogged the story at times. 

 “I pay attention to detail because you count. You matter.” 

Falling in love with Amaryllis and trying to ferret out the terrorist plot, Malichai is also dealing with the injury to his leg that just won't heal. This is where the author brings up past characters from the series and some past plot threads. I still never felt overwhelmed but around the last 20%, it is pretty much full on a collection of series characters and some particular angst following a past couple. Frequent readers of the series will probably enjoy revisiting them but I wanted more of a focus on Malichai and Amaryllis. They worked well together but the quickness that they got together and then lack of focus on them, made this feel less like a romance than a Ghostwalker book. The story also had a tendency to get very repetitive, a lot of character inner dialogue would then be repeated as outer; a good amount of editing needed to be done to clean this story up. 

 “Baby, you aren’t hearing me when I talk to you. I’ve been all over the world. In just about every country. I’ve looked for you. I’ve actively looked for you. I didn’t think you actually existed. There is no way, after finding you, that I’m going to wait to tell you how I feel. I know the real thing because I saw so many others who weren’t. You’re right for me. You’re always going to be right for me. Now, or ten years from now. It won’t matter. We fit. I told you this already.” 

Amaryllis and Malichai's romance developed too quickly for me and the terrorist plot felt jammed in but the overall theme involving how humans become Ghostwalkers was interesting. With groups of Ghostwalkers living in Montana, San Francisco, and Malichai's in Louisiana, I'll have to go back to the beginning and read about how it all started. With two women who escaped with Amaryllis still out there and some fellow Ghostwalker brothers of Malichai needing their own heroines, this series looks to still have threads to follow.

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