X-Ops Exposed

by Paige Tyler

[Melanie]

Review originally posted at BooksOfMyHeart.net.

I’m a big fan of Paige Tyler’s X-Ops series. It combines shifters and military/FBI/CIA type stuff. In this world, there are shifters, though most of the world doesn’t know anything about them. They don’t shift into full animals, but do have heightened speed and agility. They do grow claws and big teeth. Their eye can shift to give them better than night vision and have great hearing. There are several different types of shifters, cats, wolves, bears, coyotes and more. They are all born this way.

Now, many in the government don’t trust shifters. They partner them with a human, who is to kill them to keep the secret and to keep them under control. Another person high up in the X-Ops group has been working to partner people together to get romantic relationships going. She’s been pretty successful (as you can guess eight books in, and one book had two couples come together).

Now, the humans in this series, they tend to come from a military or law enforcement background of some sort (FBI, CIA, etc). The hero of the first book, Her Perfect Mate, was the leader of a group of guys in Special Forces. They’ve learned about shifters now and have become very important characters in this series.

There are “hybrids”. They are shifters who’ve been created by humans in a lab. They tend to be mentally unstable, though there are different “generations” of these as the scientist learn more and more with each group of new shifters. One of the goals of X-Ops is to shut these scientists down. It does seem for every group they shutdown, another pops up in its place.

This book features Tanner Howland. He is a feline hybrid. He is the first one X-Ops has found that has some control of himself. He does struggle with his shifter side, but has learned through meditation and other means to get himself back under control in stressful situations.

Dr. Zarina Sokolov is a genetic scientist. She was captured by the evil scientist and forced to work on the hybrids. X-Ops saved her in a earlier book and now she is working with them to try to help stabilize the X-Ops rescues.

So Tanner is hiding away, trying to protect others from his wilder side, which can be somewhat unstable, though he has been making progress. He went back near his home in Washington state and is living off the land in that area. There are also some preppers (as in doomsday preppers) that live in the area. They’ve been going missing, but they won’t contact the police, because preppers don’t trust outsiders. Tanner gets involved in the investigation.

Zarina goes out to try to find Tanner. She wants to help him. She even thinks she’s found a cure for Tanner’s hybridism (I don’t think that is a word). Anyway, there is an issue, he could lose all the memories he had of being a hybrid. He would forget her.

Another fun story of more suspense and less on the romance side (though that is a strong part of this story). As the same with all the books in this series, it is characters that really drag me in. I’m very invested in their stories. I would highly recommend that you start this series with book one. There are a lot of pieces that will be lost if you start in the middle of the series.

**Book was provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley. This review is my opinion and was not requested or provoked in anyway.