Review: Shadow Touch by Marjorie M. Liu

Title: Shadow Touch: Dirk & Steele, Book 2
Author: Marjorie M. Liu
Genre: Paranormal romance/urban fantasy
Grade: B+
Reason for Reading: I really enjoyed Tiger Eye, and wanted to explore this world Liu has created.

Synopsis: Elena Baxter can heal people with her mind. Artur Loginov, who has a dark past involving the Russian mafia, can read objects with a touch. Both of them are kidnapped by a mysterious organization calling itself the Consortium. The Consortium knows about their abilities, and wants to recruit them for its own nefarious purposes. Elena and Artur end up forming a mental connection while they’re at the consortium’s base of operation, and soon they are involved in an adventure full of intrigue, violence, and a potential love that will last a lifetime.

My Thoughts: This story was quite lovely. Yet again, Ms. Liu integrates her world-building very nicely with the romance. The action keeps moving at a brisk pace, and I found the Consortium to be the creepiest set of villains I’ve read in a romance in quite a while. I also liked that there aren’t very many, “Well, as you know, Bob” type conversations. Liu spells out for the reader what she needs to know, but lets us draw our own conclusions.

I remember that I liked Artur in the last book. He’s done some pretty dispicable things in his past, and he knows and accepts that about himself. Here, we get to delve inside his head, and we find out that he hasn’t had an easy life. A lot of authors would have chosen to make Artur a bucket of near-endless angst, but Ms. Liu doesn’t take him in that direction. He is a strong, sexy, complex man and I was glad he got his HEA.

Elena I couldn’t get into so much. I felt that she wasn’t nearly as well-drawn as Artur, and so she overshadowed him for much of the story. For a while, I thought she would also be the kind of heroine that’s simply full of sweetness and light, incapable of even contemplating doing a bad thing. But even Elena has the lines she won’t cross, and thankfully, she does what she has to. As with the first book, the romance is over relatively quickly. There’s really not much conflict at all between Artur and Elena, and they spend so much time literally inside each other’s heads that one couldn’t have been sustained all that long anyway. that normally would have creeped me out, but I liked how Ms. Liu built up the telepathic connection.

The secondary characters are interesting. We get a few glimpses of some of the old favorites from the Dirk and Steele agency, and we meet a couple of very intriguing shape-shifters, one of whom is the hero in Ms. Liu’s recent Dirk and Steele book, if memory serves. Once again, the introduction of these characters serves the plot, and even in the few scenes where I didn’t so much think that was the case, those scenes were mercifully short.

Overall, I liked this slightly gritty paranormal romance/urban fantasy. The romance is a bit weak, but it’s more than made up for by the well-drawn characters and the high drama, and hopefully it won’t be five months before I pick up the third book in this series.