REVIEW: Blaze of Memory by Nalini Singh

Lynne Connolly’s review of Blaze of Memory by Nalini Singh
Futuristic paranormal romance released by Berkley 3 Nov 09

The cover? Weird. Dev is Asian, with a fair bit of Indian in him, and he’s a director, not a cop, but the cover seems to show a George Michael type with a weapon in a blazing street. I know the scene it’s supposed to represent, it just seems more suspense than paranormal to me.

Dev Santos is the director of the Shine Foundation, which deals with the descendants of the Psy called the Forgotten. A woman is brought to him, one who has been tortured and has a terrible implant in her psychic memory, one they can’t access and they can’t remove. She refuses to respond to her name of Ekaterina, so Dev gives her the name Katya.

He takes her in to his home and looks after her. Katya has been badly treated, starved and tortured, and so mentally battered I don’t think she would have bounced back as quickly as she did.

The story is interwoven with two other narratives. One is hundred year old letters from a woman living at the cusp of the introduction of Silence. I would have loved these written as a story in themselves, but interspersed into this story, I found it took away some of the intensity of the main narrative.

The other is accounts from somewhere called the Sunshine station. At first, I connected this with the Shine Foundation, but it’s soon clear that they are separate, although I found it a bit confusing at first. I also didn’t understand Dev’s gift and how it factored into the story until quite late on.

The romance developed a bit unevenly, with some pauses to get on with the complex external plot, and at first I thought there were probably a couple of scenes too many, with a few repetitions of how and why.

Singh’s style is great, adult, with no gimmicky aspects, which is one of the reasons I enjoy her books so much. Her characters are adult too, not overgrown teens and they reason their way through the story. Perhaps a little too much at times, but I’m not complaining.

The end of the story contains a device that will be familiar to fans of the Psy/changeling series. Everything seems lost. I know, from writing “Sunfire,” how much fun these scenes are to write, but when I got to that part (desperately trying to avoid spoilers here!) I thought “I’ve read this before.” But I was happy to read it again, and see how these people coped with the dilemma.

I loved Dev, but I felt the romance was a tiny bit lacking. I’m not even sure why, because it’s all there – the sex, the growing intimacy, tenderness and care, but I did feel disassociated from the characters occasionally, not as involved as I wanted to be.

Still, I love this series and I’m eagerly awaiting the next one.

GRADE: B

Read other reviews of this series by clicking on its tag here.

Summary:

Nalini Singh returns to the Psy/Changeling world and its “breathtaking blend of passion, adventure, and the paranormal”* as a woman without a past becomes the pawn of a man who controls her future…

Dev Santos discovers her unconscious and battered, with no memory of who she is. All she knows is that she’s dangerous. Charged with protecting his people’s most vulnerable secrets, Dev is duty-bound to eliminate all threats. It’s a task he’s never hesitated to complete…until he finds himself drawn to a woman who might yet prove the enemy’s most insidious weapon.

Stripped of her memories by a shadowy oppressor, and programmed to carry out cold-blooded murder, Katya Haas is fighting desperately for her sanity itself. Her only hope is Dev. But how can she expect to gain the trust of a man who could very well be her next target? For in this game, one must die…

Read an excerpt here.

Other books in the series: