Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Silent Blade

This novelette isn’t one of Ilona Andrews’ best, but I still have found myself rereading it a couple of times when I needed a quick IA pick-me-up, and I like it a little better each time I read it. So. Maybe 3.5 stars?

This 42 page fantasy romance by Ilona Andrews is about an elaborate revenge plot: In a world where certain families have been bred with near-magical mental and physical powers, arranged marriages are made to keep the families and their powers strong (a concept that the Andrews developed more fully later on in their HIDDEN LEGACY series, beginning with Burn for Me, but that series is set on Earth while the KINSMEN stories are on other planets).

Eighteen years ago, a marriage was arranged between Celino Carvanna and Meli Galdes, when he was 16 and she was 10 ... the intent being that they would get married when she turned 18. But Celino always resented being forced into marriage, and when Meli was 16 he rudely broke the engagement, unintentionally crushing Meli's general marital prospects in the process. She ended up officially excising herself from her family to avoid the shame, becoming a skilled assassin who helps her family out periodically where she feels like a revenge killing is justified.

Now Meli's brother comes to her with one last assassination request: take out Celino Carvanna, who's recently damaged their family's business. The prospect of bringing him down is too much for Meli to resist. As powerful as he is, she has some inside information that will help her get past his guards and protections. But what she doesn't plan on is the strong attraction that develops between them.

There are some cool concepts at play in this story and a few great scenes, but it's kind of a superficial romance, probably because of the short length of the story. I never completely engaged with the main characters, and there wasn't enough to really make me buy into their relationship or the motivations for their actions in the end. Because of this, the relationship (not to mention the sexytimes) left me pretty much unmoved. My biggest issue is a detail about the ending: (view spoiler)[Two years of no contact before she goes back to him?? And she basically just stalks him for the last six months of that time? It didn’t ring true. (hide spoiler)]

The Andrews team withdrew this story from the market for a few years and said that they were going to rework it, but it's on sale again now and I don't believe they made any changes. (If I'm wrong, I'd love to know that.) Read it if you're an Ilona Andrews completist or really enjoy SF romance; otherwise I'd point you to their novels or even just Silver Shark, a semi-sequel that works fine as a stand-alone read.