BLURB:

Jonas Stone has been given his first independent operation: rescue the insurrection leader’s imprisoned grandson from the Mission. Getting the job done means more than getting Danny Granger out-it means staying with him while he heals. Staying too close, for way too long.

Danny is everything Jonas isn’t: confident, optimistic, honest–a man to be reckoned with. If only it didn’t mean going against everything Jonas has planned. He’s kept his secrets for years, hid behind a mask no one could see through…until now. Danny isn’t the kind of man Jonas deserves. But he might be exactly the man he needs…

SERIES RECAP:

The streets of New Seattle have become a battleground between the Holy Order’s agents and the witches persecuted in the name of “keeping of the peace”. Battle-lines are shifting, good and evil not nearly so clear-cut as witches and rogue hunters have banded together in an uncertain alliance with rebels determined to peel back layers of conspiracy that go back decades before the cataclysm that changed the world forever. The Order has made it’s move, overthrowing the city government in a bloody coup, and present-viewer Jessie, ex-hunter Silas, newly minted witch Naomi, the felon Phin Clarke, seer Caleb and genetically enhanced witch Juliet are suddenly thrown together with the displaced Mission Director Parker Adams and Simon, a double-agent whose witch genes are slowly killing him. The rebels need to gain some ground, get back their imprisoned people, or this will be the shortest rebellion in history.

EXCERPT:

For my Uncle Stephen. You were the first man in my life who bravely came out to me, and who paved the way for me to be myself. I loved you so much before, and I love you just as much now. You are my inspiration.

And for every gay, lesbian, bi-, trans-, queer, and questioning youth out there. Life can be hard, sometimes it can get mean. There will be days when you feel like it’s impossible, but I want you to know that there are people like me out here who support you. I promise : it gets better.

Chapter One

A blue-white light flickered in the dark. Sparks glinted off the tool racks bolted to the wall across the shadowed room, reflected from the metal braces left leaning against the desk. As silence—mind-numbingly loud, thick as water, and twice as hard to breathe—filled the narrow room, that blue-white light caught in the circular lenses of a pair of glasses and threw a glare across the screen.
Jonas Stone stirred. “It has to be now,” he said, his voice too loud in the oppressive weight of the shadows behind him. He couldn’t look away from the feed spilling its incandescent glow over his desk, his keyboard.
His conscience.
Because the man framed in that digital feed—the kid strapped to the chair dead center of the surveillance footage—wasn’t the first suspected heretic to sit there. To sweat there.
To bleed.
“Be sure, Jonas. We get one shot at this.”
His brain wanted to look at the comm unit beside his left hand. His body refused to obey, every cell focused on the prisoner’s dark, drooping head. Scarred fingers twitched, knuckles whitening, and Jonas frowned as he realized his right hand had closed into a painful fist.
It had to be now. The kid wouldn’t last much longer.
“There’s no alternative,” he replied. “We’re not going to get another opening soon enough to . . .” He hesitated.
The voice over the comm link didn’t waver. Not even a fracture. “Soon enough to save him.”
Only through recent experience did Jonas know that the raspy, lifetime-pack-a-day voice coming out of the secure line belonged to a woman named May. Leader of a rebellion that had saved Jonas’s life, and the perpetrator behind a string of hacking jobs that left Jonas seriously reconsidering a career shift before the Church had made that choice for him.
The fact that she was very, very good was all that kept him from throwing in the towel now.
But he’d never met her in person. Hell, he’d never met the prisoner now struggling to raise his head in Jonas’s feed, either. Instead, all he had was a picture in a box, a hacked security feed, and too many hours spent staring at the incandescent screen until his eyeballs throbbed and the vicious curl of helplessness inside him turned to a spiraling ache.
That boy didn’t belong in that kind of interrogation room.
A single light, faded blue, gleamed over shoulders broader than Jonas’s, but not by much. The prisoner was athletically lean where Jonas was simply skinny. The narrowly defined muscles of his chest were outlined by the stained remains of a thin, long-sleeve shirt. Blood and sweat had turned it nearly brown. His slumped shoulders strained against the restraints confining him to the hard metal chair, a position not just awkward but painful as hell. Jonas hadn’t seen his face for over an hour.
He didn’t have to. He knew what he’d see when—if—the kid raised his chin again.
Blood caked into a ridged scab across the fine slash of his upper lip, under his broad nose and over a determinedly sculpted chin. He’d see the blackened stains of it dried into the man’s ears, blending into his dark brown hair. Even now, that greasy fringe flopped over his forehead, long since sweating off the gel that had held it into its fashionable spikes. The longest of the textured strands would slide into one swollen eye, if it ever opened again.
The prisoner had eyes the color of the computer-lit confines of the places Jonas preferred to inhabit. Almost black, even without pain stripping them to an endless void. When open, those eyes all but crackled with an intensity that could take a lesser man’s objectivity away in a single glance. Like a hungry kid or a kicked puppy.
Or a man on the edge of desperation.
Jonas’s chest kicked.
“Let me know when your people are ready.” He didn’t bother hiding the raw regret in his voice. He’d felt a lot of it, lately. After all, he used to be the man who helped put people into rooms just like that.
“Fine.” May’s voice cracked. Flattened. “I’m trusting you, Jonas.”
“I know.” They always did. “Let me try. I’m positive I can get him out. They won’t expect it this soon.”

REVIEW:

This is a short story by Karina Cooper as part of her Dark Mission series.  I have to tell you that this is the first in this series that I have read and my first full M/M romance. 

Jonas had spent time with the Church and now is the tech genius in the rebellion.  He is called to help a prisoner named Danny escape.  Danny knows he has to fight to survive and when he hears the voice of his “angel” on the other end of the comm line, he knows he will continue to fight.

Danny has a long road to travel in his recovery but can’t hide his attraction to Jonas.  Jonas on the other hand is struggling to deal with his sexuality and the thought of loving Danny.

Check it out and let me know what you guys think. 🙂

Rated 3 Bookworms

AUTHOR INFO:

Born from the genetic mash-up of lesser royalty, storytellers, wanderers and dreamers, KARINA COOPER was destined to be a creative genius. As a child, she moved all over the country like some kind of waifish blonde gypsy and thrived in the new cultures her family settled in. When she (finally) grew up, she skipped the whole genius part and fell in love with writing because, really, who doesn’t love making things up for a living?

One part romance fanatic, one part total dork, and all imagination, she writes dark and sexy paranormal romance and urban fantasy. When she isn’t writing, Karina is an airship captain’s wife and Steampunk fashionista. She lives in the beautiful and rainy Pacific Northwest with a husband, four cats, two rabbits, the fantasy of a dog, and a passel of adopted gamer geeks.

Links:
http://www.karinacooper.com
@karinacooper /https://twitter.com/karinacooper
http://www.avonromance.com/author/karina-cooper

BUY LINKS:

http://www.avonromance.com/book/karina-cooper-wicked-lies

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Wicked-Lies-Karina-Cooper?isbn=9780062136008&HCHP=TB_Wicked+Lies

http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Lies-Mission-Novella-ebook/dp/B0092QPCXS/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1362078484&sr=8-4&keywords=wicked+lies

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wicked-lies-karina-cooper/1113200572

SYNOPSIS:

This novel was originally published as an e-book in 2011 under the title Knockers.
If you like Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, and Liza Palmer, you’ll love Ellyn Oaksmith!
Molly Gallagher does not like to be the center of attention. As the mysterious Diner X, her pseudonym for a restaurant review column, she thrives on blending in. But before you can say “medical malpractice,” she wakes up from a routine procedure to find that her chart got switched with someone else’s, and now her A cup runneth over.

Suddenly, unassuming Molly is turning heads wherever she goes. The man she’s been pining for since high school is sitting up and taking notice, a very handsome stranger has captured her attention, and her lifelong dream of publishing a cookbook is about to come true. But Molly feels like an imposter. Will some advice from avery strange place help her figure out how to navigate her new, full-figured world?

Molly realizes her revamped shape might change her life. She just doesn’t anticipate quite how much . . .

EXCERPT:

“Here we go,” says the anesthesiologist. Poking the needle into my arm, he withdraws a tiny bit of blood into the clear drug he’s about to shoot into my vein. Red blood blooms in the benzodiazepine. I squeeze Angeli’s hand, grateful to have an ally in the room. She squeezes back hard, too hard. From the bed where I rest, prone in my unisex surgery gown, I can see that Angeli’s brown eyes are scary huge, like melting chocolates. She stares at the needle, transfixed, her lush coffee-​colored skin now ashy pale. She clasps my hand until my fingers tingle. I want to say something about my hand being strangled, but the drug is taking effect. My brain floats three feet above, watching Angeli wobble unsteadily. Her skin fades further to a weird hue, lips purplish white. I haven’t seen her this shade since high school, when we drank all my dad’s Crown Royal and threw up on my mom’s prize Tropicana rosebushes. She’s going to faint.

In the back of my drug-​addled brain there is a tug of remembrance, a creeping sense of doom. Why did Angeli quit medical school? Because she was tired of her doctor parents pushing their profession, their immigrant drive, their Indian lives down her thoroughly Americanized throat. That was it, right? Then I remember: she quit because she fainted at the sight of blood.

“You’re squeezing my hand too hard,” I squeal.

This isn’t happening. I’m shot full of drugs, going down faster than the Hindenburg, and my best friend, the person who is supposed to drive me, tend me, and take the helm while I am out of commission, is teetering like a drunk. My lips numb Lovely soft fuzz fills my brain. I remember some comedian’s quip about why so many people become drug addicts: because drugs are fun. I give Angeli a squishy smile, trying to form a sentence in my soggy brain, something about how she’d better not faint because I need her to look after me. Then Angeli disappears from view. One minute she’s there, and the next, nothing but wall space and a dull thud.

I turn woozily to the anesthesiologist. He looks down at the floor, a deep frown creasing his brow.

“Nola, we got a fainter!” he yells.

Panicking, I realize that this surgery, which is supposed to rid me of the scars on my neck and chest, boost my confidence, expand my career, and maybe even jump-​start my love life, isn’t going well. And I haven’t even left the pre-op room. The last thing that goes through my head is this: I’ve picked the wrong damn friend.

Medical errors occur in 17 percent of all hospital procedures. Most of them are caused by understaffing, fatigue, lack of communication, and staff error. My best friend caused mine. When it came time to pick my advocate during surgery, it came down to five people: my sisters, Trina and Denise; my best friends, Martin and Angeli; and my dad. Trina was out because I was using her plastic surgeon. She’d spend all her time agonizing over whether or not to get a quick shot of Botox instead of looking out for me. My younger sister Denise is too busy chaining herself to whaling ships and picketing outside the federal building. Besides, she’d view plastic surgery as antifeminist, lecturing me on embracing my scars and wearing them like a badge of courage. My dad, well, surgery would remind him of the worst night of his life, the night I got the scars. Martin was busy covering my job at the newspaper.

Angeli, who never mentioned anything about queasiness at the sight of blood, could easily get someone to cover for her at the Clinique counter at Nordstrom. She seemed the obvious choice.

I subscribe to the domino theory of life. One bad choice or event triggers a chain of events that then lead to an explosion in one’s life. In this case, Angeli was the first tilting tile. Nurse Nola, who rushed to pick Angeli off the floor, was holding someone else’s chart. In her haste, she dropped the chart on my bed. Three minutes later I was wheeled into surgery with another patient’s chart. I wake up in the recovery room three hours later feeling as if I’ve fallen off a cliff. It’s not so bad, though, because I’ve landed in a warm pile of drugs. A wan, tired Angeli is at my side, holding my hand, smiling in her surprisingly empathetic way. In a chemical haze, I tilt my head from side to side. The room swims pleasantly as though I’m underwater. Dimly aware of a faint ache in my chest and neck, I float above the pain, enjoying my little high. This isn’t so bad. My surgeon, Dr. Hupta, told me I’d have lots more pain after the drugs wear off. But then he’ll give me more to take home. Easy peasy.

Across from me is a teenage girl with bandages covering her cheeks and nose, sipping from a green juice box. Her mother, in a pink velour jogging suit, flips through a movie magazine. They watch me as I blink my eyes woozily, struggling to sit up. Angeli jumps from her chair to help me.

“Here, here, I got it.” She presses a button, lifting the bed. As my head becomes level with hers, she whispers in my ear, nodding at the teenager. “One guess what she’s in here for.”

Before I can answer, a nurse bustles in, her neon white smile fixed. “Well, hello there. And how are we feeling after our big day in surgery?”

I try to say, “Fine.” It comes out, “Fiiiiaaaay.”

The nurse takes my pulse, listens to my heart rate, and hands me a juice box. “We need to get your blood sugar up, or you’ll end up on the ground like your friend here when you try to walk.”

Angeli rolls her eyes behind the nurse’s back. As soon as she leaves, Angeli whispers about my roommate. “Nose job. High school graduation present. Can you imagine? Happy graduation; how’d you like a new schnoz?”

Slowly I drink my apple juice, my head clearing slightly. “I doubt it went like that. Nice disappearing act back there.”

She rolls her eyes and shrugs. “Now you know why I flunked premed.”

“You said blood used to make you queasy, not parallel.” I wince as the pain radiates into my neck and shoulders.

REVIEW:

Oh my goodness, Kittens!  I laughed my butt off with this book!  I can not even begin to imagine what I would do if I went in for cosmetic surgery and came out with something, well, more.  When Molly realizes that she went from flat to fabulous, she is seriously bent out of shape…literally.  Knowing that she has to wait to have her breasts fixed is something that nearly drives her insane and when they start talking to her, well let’s just say that is the kicker. 

What Molly doesn’t expect is that the mistake that she thought would destroy her is what actually brings her to life.  She gains the confidence she has always been lacking to get out there and take charge of her life.  Her first stop is to get the guy from high school.  We all know that is mistake but she has to learn. 

Gotta say that when a Wolf is prowling at your door, you better pay attention!  Love it and you all need to check it out!

Rated 4 Bookworms

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Adventures-With-Max-Louise-Ellyn-Oaksmith/?isbn=9780062268105

http://www.ellynoaksmith.com/

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