Title: Prickly Business (Portland Pack Chronicles #1)
Author Name & Publisher: Piper Vaughn & Kenzie Cade
Publication Date & Length: July 27, 2015 – 97,000 Words
Some people might call Avery Babineaux a prick. He’s a hedgehog shifter from an old-money Louisiana family with a penchant for expensive shoes and a reputation for being a judgmental snob. His attitude is why he and his fated mate are estranged. Not that Avery cares. He doesn’t want to be mated to some blue-collar werewolf anyway. Or so he keeps telling himself.
No werewolf likes to be looked down upon, least of all Dylan Green. He doesn’t need a mate, especially not some snotty hedgehog who sneers at his custom motorcycle shop and calls him a grease monkey. But when Avery gets into trouble with a shady loan shark, Dylan can’t stand by and let him be hurt—whether he wants the brat or not.
Yet once Dylan steps into Avery’s world, he realizes there’s more to Avery than his prickly exterior, and that unexpected vulnerability calls to Dylan’s protective instincts. The sassy little hedgehog needs a keeper, and despite their horrible first impressions, Dylan starts to believe he might be the wolf for the job.
I know. A hedgehog shifter? I had my reservations, but this is a good read. Avery is an entitled Southern gentleman hedgehog shifter twink (whew!). His mate, Dylan, is a blue collar mechanic werewolf. Neither is especially happy that fate has decided to match them.
At the start of the book, Avery is more than a little TSTL. He lives off a huge allowance, wears designer clothes and lives in a designer apartment. It is only when he does something really stupid and becomes indebted to a mob boss that Dylan intervenes for him.
But Avery grows up. He gets a job. He starts to support himself. He actually starts to care for people less fortunate than himself. And Dylan (gorgeous and absolutely perfect from the first page) learns to care for him.
The mystery Avery entangles himself in doesn’t completely work for me. His stupidity never completely leaves him (I’m going to run into danger without telling anyone where I am) but his hedgehog form actually proves useful when running from bad guys.
The romance works most of the time in this story. At times, Avery seems very young and Dylan almost takes on a fatherly role. The men are sweet together and it looks like we may see them again in a future book.
This is a simple, easy romance. The premise is cute – and Avery’s detective escapades add some excitement.
Piper Vaughn Bio
Piper Vaughn wrote her first love story at eleven and never looked back. Since then, she’s known that writing in some form was exactly what she wanted to do. A reader at the core, Piper loves nothing more than getting lost in a great book—fantasy, young adult, romance, she loves them all (and has a two thousand book library to prove it!). She grew up in Chicago, in an ethnically diverse neighborhood, and loves to put faces and characters of every ethnicity in her stories, so her fictional worlds are as colorful as the real one. Above all, she believes that everyone needs a little true love in their life…even if it’s only in a book.
Kenzie Cade Bio
Kenzie Cade was born and raised in the South where she spends her days in the sometimes stressful field of private medicine observing interesting people and committing them to memory for later use. When she isn’t reading, experimenting with recipes, or being distracted by social media, Kenzie spends time with her family, friends, and the Pomeranian/Long-haired Chihuahua mix who likes to keep her company while she writes. As a young girl, Kenzie dreamed of princesses and their white knights. As an adult (or sort of adult), she dreams of princes and their proverbial white knights, which she attributes the fellow Arkansan S.E. Hinton and her novel The Outsiders. Writing to keep the fictional voices at bay, Kenzie enjoys the journeys her characters travel to find their happy endings, and she loves the challenge of writing a great love story. Contact Kenzie at kenziecade.author@gmail.com. You can also find her online at her blog: kenziecade.wordpress.com; on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kenziecade.author; and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thekenziecade.
Piper Vaughn
Facebook
Twitter
Author’s Website
Author’s GoodReads Page
Kenzie Cade
