The Fallen Angels Series Debut: Covet

I admit it. I’m a binge reader. I get all melancholic and turn to a new paranormal romance series, then blow through all of the books as fast as possible. My most recent binge introduced me to J.R Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series, and I read all 7 books over the course of a week. The almost cliff-hanger ending of the seventh book, Lover Avenged, left me jonesing for more stories of the gang from fictional Caldwell, NY, right in time for the release of Ward’s new series’ debut Covet.

The Premise

Good and Evil are playing a little game: 7 specific souls, whoever claims the most will control the world—forever—no chance for a tie. The side of good has tapped one man, a mysterious military-type who goes by “Jim”, to serve as their champion with the goal of winning those seven souls for their side by swaying them away from the one Cardinal Sin they embrace. Covet, as the name suggests, focuses on Greed. Add in a healthy dose of romance between our main sinner and woman struggling to handle her trade (prostitution) and Catholic faith while running from her past, and we have all the workings of a novel paranormal romance novel.

The Major Players

Jim Heron (or is it Zacharias?), whom I’ll call the soul-saver, has a foggy background of special-ops associations and lingering trauma over his mother’s death. The entire premise of the series hinges on this character, however character development is kind of slim in favor of the characters involved in the romantic part of the plot. Hopefully we’ll learn more about him in the next installment.

The male romantic character, Vin diPietro has built himself up from the lower-middle-class to the top .01%—showing greed brought on by attempts at banishing his prescience via an unknown ritual at 17. While on a visit to see the progress of construction on his new temple mansion along the Hudson, he witnesses the accidental electrocution of Jim, one of the hired carpenters. After Jim is revived with his new soul-saving life mission, the two of them are tied into an odd friendship as Jim struggles to figure out how to save his first soul. We follow Vin as he realizes how unhappy he is focused on possessions, and turns his sights on a new goal—nurturing the shocking connection he feels toward Marie-Terese.

A crossover character from ZeroSum/Iron Mask in BDB 7 Lover Avenged, Marie-Terese Boudreau/Gretchen Capricio is working Johns at Iron Mask to pay off debt accrued from trying to find and retrieve her son from her mobster ex-husband, and then divorce the guy. Vin steps in and saves her from overzealous drugged-out college guys who think a working gal has no right to choose her clients, and the rest, they say, is history. Of course, since we need mystery in our romance, it’s not easy, but there’s a high likelihood of our distressed damsel being saved.

Thoughts

While this story takes place in the same world as DBD, and uses an ensemble cast of supporting and minor characters from the series, Ward has moved far from the Vampire world of the Brotherhood and headed straight to Christianity. Or, Demons and Angels and Catholicism at least. I am unsure as to whether Ward plans on continuing the connection with BDB or if successive books are going to move out of Caldwell as we follow Jim on his quest. Certainly, nothing in the ending of the book lends itself toward sticking with Caldwell. Yet, it makes little sense to spin-off a series in the same world, only to move away from it as the series progresses, so I’m curious to see where this is going.

In addition to the somewhat vague connection with Caldwell, I did not come away with a clear sense of where Jim is going next, in a soul-saving sense. Series generally have a logical progression between books that is apparent at the end of the first, and while it is sometimes tenuous at best between the first and second in a series if there is no series contract in place, presumably Ward has signed on for multiple Fallen Angel books. However, I can’t begin to prognosticate on where this series is going. I have to say, I can’t decide which Ward book I’m looking forward to more, from a what’s-happening-next p.o.v.: Lover Mine (April 2010) (BDB or Crave, the next Fallen Angels installment.

One final note: my opinion of Ward’s writing—especially in BDB— is one of extremes. At times, her imagery is compelling, her dialogue well-structured and the composition masterful, but then she falls into wick abbreving that can probably only be understood by 20-something NESCAC/SUNY students and I want to scream. Her characters will be profound one moment, and in the next breath sound like awkward teenagers whose vocabularies contain nothing more than “like”, “fuck” and “yeah”. Add the obnoxious label dropping, and often times I wonder if Ward is the nom de plume for a sophomore class of creative writing majors. But, still, her stories are compelling and flow just right, and I can’t seem to pull myself away while reading the books. Thankfully, she’s toned down the abbreviated college-talk in this series.

The Future

Ward provides an unpublished final chapter on her Web site. While I understand her provided reason for removing it, the part of me that was enraptured by the relationship between Gretchen/Vin—and wants to know more about their future, which doesn’t seem to have a place in future books—recommends you head straight to that page and read it. Like, now. Go. Shoo. Or well, go after you’ve read Covet. She also mentions an Epilogue that has instead been incorporated into the next book. I wonder if some of my complaints would have been resolved had it been left in. I wait with baited breath for the first available excerpt of Crave.

And if Ms. Ward, her agent or publisher reads this: No offense, but that Web site makes the Web Developer side of me weep. Esp. the broken links and lack of updates. I’d redo it in a heartbeat for a song. Or, rather, lifetime advance reads?