Shadow Game, Mind Game

These two are the first of a series by Christine Feehan, and are classified as "paranormal romance" if you want to look at genre labeling. To me, they just prove that I will read just about anything, no matter how trite. I bought five books in the series on the recommendation of a colleague, and for the first time I am questioning her taste.

The problem is, the premise of these books has great potential, but the author wastes a lot of it.

In Shadow Game, Feehan sets up the group of paranormals known as GhostWalkers. These are people with enhanced psychic abilities of various kinds, developed through clandestine experiments by Doctor Peter Whitney. Years earlier, he "acquired" throwaway female orphan children from foreign countries that had odd abilities, sequestered them, and trained them so their abilities would grow. Most of the children developed difficulties that he couldn't deal with, so he placed them with various caretakers. But he kept Lily as his adopted daughter, and trained her to follow in his footsteps as a scientist -- without telling her exactly what he was up to.

Skip forward to the present day, and Shadow Game discovers that Dr. Whitney now has a group of military men who volunteered to have their abilities enhanced also, and who were assigned to work as a team in covert operations. However, there is a traitor in the military command who wants to shut down the operation and is killing off some of the team. The others are imprisoned in a laboratory. One of them, Captain Ryland Miller, is attracted to Lily and she feels the same way about him. When her father is killed, she uses her money and position as the new head of the research facility to rescue the men. And she and Miller get it on. And get it on. And get it on.

Long on lovemaking and exploration of their mutual attraction, and very short on credible plot, Shadow Game is a shadow of what it could have been.

In Mind Game, the author's pattern emerges as one of the team members is assigned to track down one of the young girls, now grown to womanhood, who knows nothing about the GhostWalkers. Obviously, each book in the series is now going to be a pairing-off of a male team member with one of the lost young women from the group that Lily trained with. Plot advancement is scattered lightly -- very lightly -- amidst pages of erotic prose. I expect more of the same in the remaining books. (To be honest, I am now skipping the sex scenes to get to the passages that actually advance the story.)

Bottom line: Mindless Games