Mine To Possess, by Nalini Singh

The fourth installment in the Psy/Changeling series, this story centers again on one of the sentinels of the DarkRiver pack, Clay, and brings back a ghost from his past—Talin, the human girl who once upon a time gave him unconditional love and trust.

This novel can be enjoyed on its own merits, as it has a self-contained plot and the world building holds its internal consistency in an excellent manner, but I definitely recommend starting this series at the beginning. There are just too many background threads set up in the overall story arc of the series for a reader to catch all the nuances and references if starting with this book.

Here’s the back cover blurb:

Clay Bennett is a powerful Dark River sentinel, but he grew up in the slums with his human mother, never knowing his changeling father. As a young boy without the bonds of Pack, he tried to stifle his animal nature. He failed… and committed the most extreme act of violence, killing a man, and lost his best friend, Talin, in the bloody aftermath. Everything good in him died the day he was told that she, too, was dead.

Talin McKade barely survived a childhood drenched in bloodshed and terror. Now a new nightmare stalks her—the street children she works to protect are disappearing and turning up dead. Determined to keep them safe, she unlocks the darkest secret in her heart and returns to ask the help of the strongest man she knows…

Clay lost Talin once. He will not let her go again and hungers to possess her with a clawing need born of the leopard within. As they race to save the innocent, Clay and Talin must face the violent truths in their past… or lose everything that ever mattered.

The blurb is overly melodramatic in tone, if any one asks me (and whoever wrote it, really should have asked a reader—seriously) so I’ll try to rephrase it briefly: (more…)