Casee‘s review of Sin Undone (Demonica series, Book 5) by Larissa Ione.

HER TOUCH IS DEADLY


As the only female Seminus demon ever born, master assassin Sinead Donnelly is used to being treated like an outcast. She spent decades enslaved, and now vows she’ll die before she’ll relinquish her freedom again. Then Sin’s innate ability to kill her enemies goes awry: She creates a lethal new werewolf virus that sparks a firestorm of panic and violence.


HIS HUNGER CAN’T BE DENIED


Half-werewolf, half-vampire Conall Dearghul is charged with bringing in Sin to face punishment for the plague. And she’s no stranger: He’s bound to her by blood, and the one sexual encounter they shared has left him hungering for her raw sensuality. Worse, Sin is the underworld’s most wanted and Con soon learns he’s the only one who can help her . . . and that saving her life might mean sacrificing his own.

Sin is one of those heroines that makes you wonder…how can she even be a heroine? She used to be an assassin. Now she’s the leader of an assassin’s den. She created disease that is killing wargs. A disease that has no cure. Sin isn’t very likable. At most you can feel pity for her because she’s been through so much. I have to hand it to Larissa. By the end of this book, Sin became my favorite heroine of this series.

Con is a dhampire which is a half warg-half vampire. I think that’s why he’s a dhampire. That was all a bit confusing to me. Anywho, Con loves to hate Sin. He loves to do her, too. He hates that he wants her because there are no redeeming qualities that he can see. She’s a stone cold killer as far as Con is concerned. When Eiolden tells Con and Sin that the two of them are the key to creating the antibodies for the antidote, Con can’t say no. He’s heroic like that.

To do what her brother wants her to do forces her to leave her assassin den. By doing so, she is fair game to her assassins. Whoever kills her gets to take over the den. It doesn’t take them long to start coming after her and pretty soon she and Con are running for their lives. Sin’s feelings for Con are mixed. As a Seminus demon, she wants him all the time. She chalks that up to wanting sex because that’s the kind of demon she is, but eventually admits that she actually likes him. What she doesn’t like is his obvious disdain for her.

After being forced into close contact with Sin, Con can tell that there really is a big ‘ol softie underneath the hard exterior. Okay, not really. What he can see is that Sin holds everything in. Something primitive in Con rejects that and he does everything he can to make Sin let go. Just let it allllll go. When he does, well, that’s my favorite scene in the book. It’s powerful stuff, yo. Emotional as anything I’ve read in recent memory.

When Sin decides to do something, she doesn’t do it halfway. That’s one of the things I loved about her. Once she actually let go and admitted that she had feelings, she didn’t try to hide them. She would try to hide them from Con, but she could admit to herself how she felt where before she couldn’t even do that. Con really couldn’t understand where his feelings for Sin were coming from. Since she was a Seminus demon, he knows she needs sex and needs it often. What’s confusing him is that the thought of her having sex with anyone but him all but throws him into a jealous rage, something he has never felt before.

Sin Undone really takes the reader farther into the world and the politics involved. In the Demonica world, the paranormal beings are just like human beings. They have the same biases, the same feelings of being better than others.

What really made this book amazing were the sacrifices that both Con and Sin made for each other. That’s how you really know that these two were really meant to be.

4.25 out of 5.

This book is available from Grand Central Publishing. You can buy it here.

The series:

Forbidden Temptations…

Serena Kelley is an archaeologist and treasure hunter—and a woman with a secret. Since she was seven, she’s been the keeper of a powerful charm that grants her health and immortality . . . as long as she stays a virgin. But Serena isn’t all that innocent. And when a dangerously handsome stranger brings her to the brink of ecstasy, she wonders if she’s finally met the one man she cannot resist.

Fatal Desires…

Wraith is a Seminus demon with a death wish. But when an old enemy poisons him, he must find Serena and persuade her to give him the only known antidote in the universe—her charm. Yet, as she begins to surrender to his seductions, and Wraith senses the cure is within his grasp, he realizes a horrible truth: he’s falling for the woman whose life he must take in order to save his own.

I’ve been intrigued by the Demonica series since I read Pleasure Unbound. Each book has gotten better and given the reader a deeper look into Underground General and the demons that run it. I think that Passion Unleashed is the best book in the series. Partly b/c of Wraith, but also b/c of the progression of the overall story-arc.

Wraith is part human/vampire/demon. He doesn’t care if he lives or dies. He doesn’t care about anything, but his two brothers. And even that bond is tested when it comes to Wraith. After he was injected with a poison in which there is no antidote, Eidolon and Shade tell Wraith that he has to live or the hospital that they built with their blood (literally) will collapse around their ears. Already, Wraith’s sickness is wreaking havoc in UG. His only chance is to go after Serena Kelley, a charmed human. If he can take her virginity, he gets her charm which would cause him to stop dying.

Wraith has a big problem with that from the beginning; starting with the fact that Serena is human. Wraith never has sex with humans, but it seems like he has no choice. What he thinks will be easy, he soon finds is anything but. For the first time in his life, he is feeling something that he hasn’t felt before. Protectiveness, possession, and even love. He can’t take Serena’s charm b/c to do so would bring back the disease that was killing her before she was given the charm. For the first time in his life, Wraith is putting another person’s needs above his own.

Serena has no idea that the man she knows as Josh is a vampire/demon. Thinking that he was sent by the Aegis to recover an artifact, Serena has a hard time concentrating on what needs to be done. In the past it has been relatively easy for Serena to remain celibate. Now, for the first time in her life, she actually wishes she was someone else, someone that wasn’t “charmed”.

The more time they spend together, the more Wraith is certain that he can’t condemn Serena to death. That’s before he learns information from his brothers that rocks his world. Plus, he also has to stop Armageddon.

The fact that Wraith’s mate was a human woman made this book all the better b/c of his aversion to them. I loved how protective he was of her. The irony was that Serena made Wraith’s human side come out.

So Larissa, when is the next book?

4.25 out of 5.

This book is available from Grand Central. You can buy it here or here in e-format.

Other books in the series:

While reading this book, I had to put aside my personal feelings on slutty heroes. As a Seminus demon, Shade has an insatiable need for sex and one person can’t satisfy him. If he senses that a woman wants him, he’s bound (literally) to give her what she wants. That’s exactly what happened when he first saw Runa at a local coffee shop. Their “relationship” was going along quite nicely until Runa walked in on Shade doing a vampire and a demon…at the same time. Devastated (as a human, Runa obviously can’t comprehend), she runs from his apartment out into the night…only to get bitten by a werewolf.

Yes, kiddies, Runa is now a werewolf. A pissed off werewolf at that. She blames Shade for every bad thing that’s happened to her since that night and she can’t wait to have her revenge. So when they wake up next to each other, both abducted, she has to put her revenge plotting on hold and help Shade figure out how to get them out of there.

Before they can do that, they’re tricked by the evil villain into bonding with each other. That’s bad enough in and of itself. When you add to the fact that Shade was cursed by a pissed off warlock many years ago, well, that’s a recipe for disaster. According to the curse, when he falls in love, he’ll just fade away to nothing. While Shade would love to break the curse, he was never worried about it. Then he met Runa. Now he’s bonded to her.

If that’s not enough for a demon to process, Shade also has to deal with his psychotic brother who has come back from the dead. Roag was already going a little psycho before he supposedly died in a fire, now he’s just bat-shit crazy. He wants to kill Shade, kidnap Wraith and force Eidolon to transplant all Wraith’s organs into himself. That way he can stay with his mate. After that’s done, he’ll kill Eidolon.

This book started fast and didn’t slow down. I really enjoyed how Larissa continued to build the Demonica world. I just find the idea of a demon hospital fascinating. Having demon doctors and paramedics is just really interesting reading. I do wonder what would happen if a human heroine ever came along. In the first book, the heroine was a slayer. In this book, Runa is a human-turned-werewolf. So I’m interested in seeing how Larissa would write a human-turned-nothing into this book.

I’m glad we don’t have much of a wait for Wraith’s book. I can’t wait to see what he has to go through to get his hea.

4 out of 5.

This book is available from Grand Central. You can buy it here or here in e-format.