Cobblestone Press, $3.99, ISBN 978-1-60088-052-0
Fantasy Romance, 2006

Gone with the Wolf is part of the Vegas Magic series. The other books in this series are Sara Dennis’s Stacking the Deck and Shelli Stevens’s This Spells Trouble. Vegas Magic is a multi-author series revolving around three witches who venture out on Halloween for some club-hopping action to find themselves separated, caught in unexpected adventures of the paranormal kind, and, of course, finding hot boyfriends in the process. Set in the festive carnival backdrop of Las Vegas, this story already has color and atmosphere to make it a most memorable read. It’s up to the author to capitalize on the backdrop to make her story work.

Scarlet Nelson and her fellow witch girlfriends are out to play on Halloween night. Their destination is the Crypt, a casino in Vegas that caters to the paranormal denizens in town although the few humans that manage to be invited inside aren’t aware of this. Scarlet is especially looking forward to a night of uncomplicated R&R after a long week of work. Unfortunately, while she’d love to do some R&R with Grant Anderson, the alpha male of the Vegas werewolves, she’s not going to act on her impulse because werewolf males can be unpredictable. You never know when they’ll start calling you their mate and stalk you day and night, after all. Scarlet clearly has read her share of paranormal romance novels. At any rate, she’s not in the mood to be anyone’s mate at the moment so alas, she’ll have to pass on that hunky werewolf.

Alas, Grant on the other hand isn’t so careful. He has the hots for Scarlet and he’s going to act on his desire. Of course, like Scarlet fears, he’s all about the “Mate! Mate! My mate!” stuff but Scarlet soon can’t remember why she’s so against the idea of being his mate.

Despite the ongoing story in all three books of this series that are supposed to involve zombies and all, Gone with the Wolf takes place mostly in Grant’s bedroom with the external subplot being mostly throwaway in how much impact it has in this story. Therefore, this story is very boring unless the reader has a thing for a fantasy where the werewolf boyfriend is not only an insistent stalker but also won’t leave her alone even for a second and gets jealous of other guys that even ask for her over the intercom. Oh, and every one of his werewolf followers not only know when they have sex, they also know the color of the bras she’d like to wear – Grant’s favorite color, naturally. I am not too keen on this fantasy, especially when there is so little plot in this story to justify the $3.99 cover price for a story that has only 41 pages.

File this one under “the less said, the better”.