Hands Of Flame
Hands Of Flame by C.E. Murphy was an interesting, but not engrossing read. The story is well populated with mythological creatures and conflict abounds. There is a different kind of paranormal romance – yes happily no vampires or werewolves as part of the romance – a diverting change, but the book simply seems to be missing a vital spark. I found it hard to stay interested and it took me over a week to read the 441 page book.
Hands Of Flame has almost too much going on at once. The book is so populated with conflict between, and within, groups of various mythological creatures it is difficult to pick just one to really care about. Given the nature of the heroine, Margrit’s job as a negotiator for the “elder races”, this may in fact be a deliberate move on the author’s part. She may not want you to choose one particular group to care about more.
Murphy does some things that really broke the illusion of fantasy for me more. First, and for me the most annoying point, was Murphy’s blatant overuse of cliché. I would finally start to get into the book only to find another cliché popping out and knocking me off the page. The other really frustrating habit, cute the first couple of times, but rapidly becoming old afterwards was her use of alliterative groups of three. I might have been able to read these groupings without being consciously aware of them but the author herself deliberately brought attention to them. After that they were extremely distracting. They may have occurred within the text prior to the point when the author drew attention to them, but if they did I hadn’t noted them.
Overall, I was unimpressed with Hands Of Flame. I’d read some of C.E. Murphy’s other work and was really looking forward to this tale, only to find it didn’t live up to the excitement it had engendered.
Hands Of Flame by C.E. Murphy, copyright 2008 by C.E. Murphy, published as a Luna book by Harlequin Books S.A., 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279, ISBN 978-0-373-80312-5
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