Liquid Silver Books, $5.95, ISBN 1-59578-254-0
Fantasy, 2006

There is probably a thin line separating “spirited and sassy” and “being an outright bitch”, and I believe Mara Lee’s heroine Dennison “Danny” Lee (not connected in any way to the author, I hope) has crossed that line the moment she shows up on page one in Half-Wed Moon.

I know, Ms Lee probably imagines that she is creating a tough-talking take-no-prisoners type of heroine here but Danny wanders throughout the story, sneering at people when she’s not denigrating them or mocking them. It gets to a point where I begin wondering what Danny’s problem is. Did someone forget to switch off the cattle prod which is shoved up her rear end? Did her cat eat her prize-winning lottery ticket? Something has to get the heroine to become all prickly and antagonistic like a dyspeptic hedgehog, although I suspect authorial miscalculation has a lot to do with the reason.

Needless to say, I’m not surprised when someone sends Danny a finger. No, really, our professional bitch who sneers and scowls as she accepts payments to help witches summon demons or something gets a finger in a package. I suppose the accompanying note “Up yours, bitch!” is lost on the way. Anyway for some reason Danny recognizes at once that the finger is her brother’s even if the author doesn’t mention any distinguishing trait on that particular digit. Maybe Danny recognizes it because she’s so used to her family members giving her the finger.

To get to the bottom of this matter, our heroine returns to her werewolf clan, the Striker Clan, where she finds herself once more entangled in the affairs of her Alpha, Alexander Randolph Holt. Danny, who is a magi (shouldn’t it be “magus” since “magi” is the plural form?) as well as wolf, is understandably very important to the Clan so Alex wants her to be part of the pack again. Danny isn’t keen on doing so because she doesn’t want to be part of Alex’s games, but Alex tells her that she will never find her brother without his help. Oh, what will our heroine do now?

This isn’t a romance as much as it is a straightforward urban fantasy, although thankfully Ms Lee doesn’t try too hard to model her story after the bestselling pornographic orgy formula of Laurell K Hamilton.

However, this story is still all about a very obvious Mary Sue heroine collecting all these paranormal hunks who adore her and want her because she is so-ooo-ooo special. And frankly, the heroine is tedious beyond belief as her vocabulary and thought processes are curiously limited to and revolves around her screeching four-lettered words that begin with F and S. Danny is one-dimensional antagonistic and abrasive and since this story revolves around this bratty character, Half-Wed Moon becomes really tedious to sit through.