Free from Benoit, the man who made him a shifter, twenty-two-year old Jacks tries to get his life in order while crashing with Farzan, the only person who knows about his werecat nature.

Then, one day, in the middle of his a grueling schedule of off-the-books jobs, a raid on a bodega pushes Jacks to transform to fend off a group of gun-wielding gangbangers.

Jacks scrambles to disguise the truth, but the incident leaves a thundering wake of questions. The police want to know what really happened to a freaked-out young thug in custody. Farzan, who has been crushing hard on Jacks since they met, begins to doubt that it’s safe to have Jacks living with him. Jacks wants to know where he belongs: with the man who took him in when no one else would or among his own kind. As he searches for answers, Jacks is confronted by a secret shifter society The Glaring. They have come to avenge the death of Jacks’ maker and to claim a powerful item that Benoit left behind.

Warning: This review contains spoilers from book 1, The Rearing.

In book one Jacks meets Benoit and becomes completely enamored with him. Benoit then turns Jacks into a Werecat and starts controlling every aspect of Jacks’ life. After Jacks is free from Benoit he moves in with his friend Farza. Jacks is practically killing himself trying to earn money to get out on his own as he feels bad about taking up space in Farzan’s basement apartment. One night, while working at Farzan’s family bodega, a group of gangbangers come in and almost kill Jacks. He manages to stay alive but now the police are interested in him because they can’t understand how two big cat incidences could have coincidentally happened at the same bodega in such a short time.

Jacks believes that he has to leave the area in order to take suspicion off of Farzan and his family but Farzan isn’t letting him go easily. Jacks also gets a visit from a man who is part of a shifter society called The Glaring – something that Jacks didn’t even know existed.

This was a nice follow up to book one. The stories are very short so we can’t get too in depth with either the characters or the story but what we got was good.

We see Jacks learning to deal with life as a werecat/human and we also see him getting closer to Farzan, which Farzan had wanted from day one. Having The Glaring step in was a bit of a surprise as Benoit never mentioned anything to Jacks about it but I thought it was an intriguing addition to the story. I’m curious to see what will happen next as Jacks heads out to get answers.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5

Andrew J. Peters