Tempting Danger by Eileen Wilks Series: World of the Lupi #1
Published by Berkley on October 4, 2004
Genres: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 324
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National bestselling author Eileen Wilks draws readers into a bold new world where the magical and mundane co-exist in an uneasy alliance--and a cop balanced on her own knife-edged struggle is their only hope against a cold-blooded killer.
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I picked up Tempting Danger by Eileen Wilk as a book club read. It came highly recommended and I was interested to see if I loved it too. I’m kind of in a reading slump so I was scared that this might affect my opinion.
In Tempting Danger we meet Lily Yu, a homicide detective who ends up the Chosen of a Lupi suspected of murder. Rule Turner is the heir of the Nokolai clan and appears to be the prime suspect in Lily’s case. However, the murder seems to have a lot of underlying facets and dirty cops may play a part.
The world building is subtle and you come to understand the way it works slowly. We are provided with what we need to know when each situation arises. There is a law that is coming up for approval, and it plays a part in the intentions of those that seek to frame Rule. These people have intense plans to keep this law from going into play and they involve plenty of magic. Lily and Rule’s mate bond becomes essential in solving the crime and defeating the bad guys. Since the benefits of the mate bond are unknown to both Rule and Lily every new thing that they are capable of is a surprise to all of us.
I liked that Lily was an independent, strong character. She may have had the mate bond forced on her, but she wasn’t going to just lay down and accept it. She also wasn’t going to accept being taken off her case. She was going to solve the murders one way or another. It was probably a good decision on Rule’s part not to lay out all that comes with a mate bond right away. I think Lily would have run the other way.
Despite the reasoning to the murders being the law, I felt like it really had more to do with upcoming magical evil. I think this is leading more into a fight that we’ll have to learn more about the Lupi legends and the magical world itself. The building of the conflict helps us learn more about what our characters are up against and foreshadow things to come.
The story itself is well written and even though I was suffering a reading slump which caused me to take a long time reading the book, I really enjoyed it. I felt invested in the characters and interested in learning more about them as well as the side characters. There feels like so much more to learn. This is definitely a good start to a new series.
About Eileen Wilks
Eileen Wilks’ first book, a Silhouette Desire published in 1996, hit the USA Today Bestseller List and was nominated for Romantic Times’ Best First Short Contemporary award. Since then, her books have appeared consistently on national bestseller lists. With thirty two books in print and novellas in nine anthologies, she has been a finalist in the prestigious Rita Awards three times, as well as receiving several nominations from Romantic Times, including one for Career Achievement in Series Romantic Suspense.
Each book in her World of the Lupi series gains a larger audience. It was originally sold in the Romance section of bookstores, but more and more you will be able to find copies cross-shelved under Sci-Fi and Fantasy as the popularity of the series grows!
Eileen has lived in the West Texas town of Midland, TX for over 30 years–three years as a young teen, and the remaining years since she moved back here as an adult. When she first started writing over 10 years ago, it hit her like the first drink for an alcoholic . . . or the first kiss for Romeo and Juliet.
She came to writing romance in a roundabout way. Having read and loved science fiction for years, that’s where she first tried her hand when the writing bug bit. Somehow her stories always ended up having a strong romantic subplot, but she hadn’t read a romance since the early 80’s and didn’t think “those little books” were her kind of stories. But when a friend in her critique group began working on a romance novel, Wilks decided she needed to give the genre another try. She asked her friend to recommend some titles–and quicker than you can say “Jayne Ann Krentz,” she fell in love. The genre had been busy growing up while she wasn’t watching. These days, with romances comprising over 50% of the mass market books published in the U.S., there are romances to appeal to almost every taste–historicals, paranormals and contemporaries that range from romantic suspense to romantic comedy, from inspirational to sizzling.
Eileen covered a lot of territory before coming home to Midland, having lived in Canada and Venezuela as well as twelve U.S. cities in five states.
