Effortlessly Reading

My Rating: 3.5

I've never read a book that had me gasping, panicking, raging, and shocked speechless in just the first fifteen pages, but boy, did Death Angel manage to make me do that. In fact, in just those fifteen pages, Linda Howard managed to make me deadly hungry for even more. A lot more. For those of you who think I'm over-exaggerating things, go read the first fifteen pages of Death Angel. I dare you to. You won't be able to stop reading.

Before I go on, let me clear some things up - a majority of Death Angel is not about Drea and Rafael. Rafael only really appears in the first one-third of the book and that's it.

The FBI part in the summary is also about two chapters, or maybe even less. I don't know why the summary made it seem that the FBI plays a huge role in the book when they don't.

Okay, so back to that first fifteen pages. Linda Howard caught me completely off-guard; in fact, I had absolutely no clue how the book would go after that first fifteen pages. Is that mysterious man going to kill Drea or will something develop between them? (I was secretly hoping something would develop between them because I wanted to see how that would turn out with the guy's ego.) Why does that guy never get mentioned in the summary? What on Earth was going to happen?!

However, Death Angel slowly goes downhill from there. We learn about things Drea does to hide from Rafael in such lengths that I become easily bored. Nothing really happens; in fact, I can pretty much summarize the rest of the book in a single sentence. Maybe two.

I also didn't really enjoy the romance, with the exception of the brilliant first chapter of course. I didn't really feel that Drea and him (I'm using "him" to avoid giving out spoilers) really connected that deeply except for that first chapter. When she told him that she loves him, I was shocked, especially since she can somehow see his deepest insecurities after really knowing him for a day. It'll be a lot better if Linda Howard decided to make things between them even slower.

Although I really hate giving this book a three-point-five rating instead of a four rating, I have to do it. Sadly, the first half of the book is the only redeeming quality of Death Angel.

ohdamnbooks: death angel