"Dead Bang on Perfection"

I was recommended Lora Leigh by writer Kate Angell. She knows how I like powerful stories that grab the reader and won't let them go. I have three of the "Breed books" and am naturally reading them out of order, typical for me. Still, that is often a good lit test to see if the book can really stand alone. Though this is fourth in the Breed Series, this one truly stands alone well. The Feline books that I have read are super, but Lora Leigh is at TOP FORM with ELIZABETH'S WOLF. At points in the feline books, while I am really enjoying them, the romance is eschewed in favor of breed matings. While it's powerful writing, it loses the true romance in favor of animal traits. However, with ELIZABETH'S WOLF, the power of the romance is dead on target. This is Lora Leigh at sheer perfection. She is so concentrated, so in tune with her characters, on the power of a predator finding and protecting his mate.

In this case the "scent" comes through letters from a little girl to a soldier, Dash Sinclair, who has been injured. No one sends letters to Dash. He is truly a lone wolf, a man genetically engineered with wolf in his coding. Unlike the feline breeds, whose traits are more obvious, his wolf breed traits are recessive. As a man born in a test tube, he is so utterly alone. When he is injured, his sight nearly taken from him, his commander sees Dash needs a lifeline, and offers it when letters from Cassie comes in. She has picked his name off a list of soldiers who didn't get mail and began writing Dash. As his commanders reads the letters, Dash begins to think of Cassie and her mother Elizabeth as his.

It's clear to Dash almost immediately, there are problems in Cassie's life with her mother. Her mother is sad and scared. Quickly, Dash needs the letters, needs the woman and child. He arranges presents for Cassie of the year of receiving letters. As he is checking out of the hospital, he learns Cassie and her mother Elizabeth have been killed in an explosion that destroyed the apartment where they were living. So the wolf goes on the hunt to kill the people responsible. He soon gets a letter from Cassie. They escaped, she has another name and her mother and she are on the run for their lives once again. So the hunt switches for Dash, a race to find the child and mother and claim them before the men hunting them catch up kill Elizabeth and take the child. We guess the reason early on (especially so if you have read the other books), but it's not the plot that pulls you. It's the power of Dash's need to protect the woman he now claims and her child.

Lora Leigh is so powerful with this story. It alone marks her as a talent to watch. This story is just so emotional, so vivid that you won't be able to put it down. Few writers reach this level of craft. So if you haven't read Lora Leigh, this is the one to start with.

Reviewed by DeborahAnne MacGillivray
Posted August 20, 2005

Summary

She brought him back from death and made him live again. Dash thought himself alone, a soldier, a fighting machine and no more. Elizabeth made him realize he was a man. Danger surrounds the woman his soul marked as his mate, death and blood and a treachery that goes beyond even his worst nightmares. But he will protect her and what she claims as her own. He was created to kill, trained to do it efficiently, and only a man bound to her, heart and soul, will have the strength to save Elizabeth and her prized possession. He is a lone wolf. A man alone. No pack, no family, no one to call his own until one single, innocent letter awoke Elizabeth's wolf.