Review: The Isis Collar by Cat Adams

The Isis Collar by Cat Adams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

2.5 stars. This book is really just more of the same. I still like Celia quite a bit. And for the first half of the book I had my hopes up that the authors had improved their writing a bit, because I hadn't rolled my eyes at all at any silly coincidences like I was so irritated by during the first three books. But it was all downhill from there.

Rizzoli's gift being intuition smacks of lazy storytelling to me, not a cute plot idea. It's too much like Dottie's clairvoyance. Both end up being excuses for the authors to get the characters in the right places at the right times with a handy voilà instead of just writing a tight story.

And then there were the coincidences. Everyone in the book turned out to be related to someone from a previous book, even the minor characters. The doctor was Chris Gaetano's dad, the mage is was Jones's daughter, the kid that gets sick is Julie, and on and on. It's kind of cute once, but after a while it's just annoying, how many people that Celia has met can possibly keep coming back into her life in different ways? There wasn't any big, fated reason reason for it, it was just supposed to be cute, so it got really irritating.

And then the plot just deteriorated. It went from four stars in the middle, to three as it got pretty mixed up with just too many elements going on, to just a total mess in the end. The level of coincidences were staggering. The woman who was kidnapped was explaining one aspect of the story about the collar to Celia couldn't even believe the story herself, even she knew it sounded ridiculous. That whole plot turned out to be so absurd. The stuff with the collar felt tacked on and like a real let down.

And then there's just the love triangle. No real effort was put into it this time. I don't think it works anyway  because John has been developed as sexy and mature and just cool and Bruno hasn't been developed as anything other than a powerful mage who keeps leaving her. Just because she keeps saying that she thinks she'll end up with him doesn't mean that I see what his appeal is at all, they have to show me.

Celia's just a bodyguard, a regular person that this extraordinary stuff happened too. That's what makes me relate to her. So when they make her life seem even more ridiculous than necessary it alienates me. I liked the stuff with her mom, with Dawna, and with her dealing with the changes in her life. I wish they'd try to keep things a bit more grounded. And I wish they'd stop relying so much on easy outs when it comes to storytelling. They sell a lot of books so it's obviously working for them, but I'd never pay for one of their books.

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