Review: Nightshifted (Edie Spence #1) by Cassie Alexander

From debut author Cassie Alexander comes a spectacular new urban fantasy series where working the nightshift can be a real nightmare. Nothing compares to being Nightshifted.
Nursing school prepared Edie Spence for a lot of things. Burn victims? No problem. Severed limbs? Piece of cake. Vampires? No way in hell. But as the newest nurse on Y4, the secret ward hidden in the bowels of County Hospital, Edie has her hands full with every paranormal patient you can imagine—from vamps and were-things to zombies and beyond…

     Edie’s just trying to learn the ropes so she can get through her latest shift unscathed.  But when a vampire servant turns to dust under her watch, all hell breaks loose. Now she’s haunted by the man’s dying words—Save Anna—and before she knows it, she’s on a mission to rescue some poor girl from the undead. Which involves crashing a vampire den, falling for a zombie, and fighting for her soul. Grey’s Anatomy was never like this…

My Review:

Edie Spence is a nurse with a problem. Her brother Jake is one step away from an overdose. So when a mysterious being asks her if she’d be willing to work for them in exchange for her brother’s safety (?) she readily agrees and starts to work at Y4.

It’s just like any nursing job, only that the patients aren’t human. Still, Edie makes do, crummy pay and all, just to see that her brother is alive and well.

Everything was going according to plan until one day, a patient dies on Edie’s watch and this sends her into a spiral of emotions. When she locates the man’s home and tries to return the dead man’s possessions, Edie unwittingly stumbles upon a mission her dead patient was trying to accomplish: saving “children” from would-be sexual predators.

Seeing her patient’s home walls filled with pictures of “children” which needed to be saved, Edie is thrust into a world she never knew existed. Along the way she meets a Shifter and a Zombie whom she can’t keep her hands off. Will Edie survive to help the girl her patient was trying to save? And who is Anna?

I had seen Nightshifted by Cassie Alexander (CA) in several blogs and the cover was really what drew me in to picking this book up. I thought it was going to be a book like Larissa Ione’s Demonica Series, which features a medical setting with paranormal patients and medical staff, filled with a mystery and sexxxy scenes that would curl my toes. *le sigh* Alas, that wasn’t at all what I got with this book.

Nightshifted hit almost all my pet peeves and triggers I hate in a book, and for the life of me, I can’t understand why I kept reading – it was almost as if I thought things would get better, but they never did.

 

Way Too Technical. The first pet peeve Nightshifted struck for me was that it was too technical.

I know the author did extensive research to get Edie’s nurse character down, but did she have to share all sorts of medical terms that I have no idea what they mean? It got way too distracting and kept jarring me out of the story. After awhile, I started skimming when things got too technical.  

Underage themes. This is one of my triggers and I avoid these types of books like the plague. But while Nightshifted never “showed” the actual children in the situations, and the “children” were – I think – several hundred year old vampires, still the fact this was even allowed in the book was too much for me.  

Jake. Ugh . . . another pet peeve for me is useless characters. Jake is Edie’s junkie brother. Edie has basically put her life on hold to bring her brother back from the brink. In taking her job at Y4, she made a deal her brother would – I think – not die from drug overdose? Because really, Jake still takes drugs throughout the whole book, stealing her furniture, and never getting his life straightened out. The only thing that changed was that now he can no longer feel high – no matter how much drugs he ingests. Yea, thanks stupid demons or whatever you are I made a pact with. Give me crummy pay, and never resolve the one thing I want: make my brother snap out of it, get his life together, and stop using drugs. *rolls eyes*

Crummy Pay. Double ugh! The worst pet peeve of all is being underpaid. Edie is a nurse, and is being exposed to all kinds of craziness working for paranormals and they don’t pay her top dollar? What kind of sh*t is that? Don’t the paranormals ever stop to think the nurses could easily take a bribe, or expose the hospital to ANYONE who offered them any money? It’s a cardinal rule, people. You deal in Top Secret shit, you get compensated for it. That way if you end up missing, everyone knows you f*cked up a good thing. LOL

Sexxy Scenes. My final pet peeve is the sex scenes – or rather lack of them in this book. They were either not good, featured unprotected sex, or were glazed over 1950’s fade-to-black style scenes. You know I can forgive ALMOST anything in a book if it’s got good sexxy scenes, so this was the final straw. I kept thinking maybe the author was holding back for that one scene that was going to blow me away. *le sigh* It never happened.

****If you don’t have any of my pet peeves or triggers and enjoy lots of medical equipment terms and medicine names thrown at you (when generic terms would serve just as well), then this is definitely the perfect read for you. Nightshifted just didn’t work for me.*****

 

He was above me, his pants still on, back arched, looking down at me. I felt like prey and I liked it. He wanted me weak and helpless, and maybe for a second I wanted those things too. Wordlessly, he grabbed my hands and yanked them over my head, to pin both down with one hand. He reached down and undid his belt buckle with his other hand, then plunged his fingers under my skirt, yanking my tights and panties down to find a ready home within me. My hips arched and I fought against my confinement—at first, just testing boundaries, but then, fighting just to fight, to see if I could get loose, how tight he would hold, how serious he was in keeping me still.

His one hand clenched around my wrists, while the other made come-hither motions, deep inside of me. He sped up as I writhed, pinned on his fingers, and I stopped trying to escape.

I was full of him, but not full enough yet. I looked up into his charcoal-dark eyes.

“Yes?” he asked, his lips drawn to the side in a soft smirk.

“You can fuck me now.”

He laughed. “Gladly.”

He pushed my legs apart with his knees, pulled out his cock, and entered me all in one smooth movement. I curled forward and bit his shoulder when he hit the back of me, crying out in surprise at his length, then ground my hips against his in desire.

We made the quiet noises of fucking then, the moans, the sound of skin hitting skin, the buckle of his belt chiming with his thrusts.

When I remembered, I would fight him, pushing back with my arms against both his hands now trapping me down. I didn’t want to find I could get free.

His cock found the back of me again and again, and I kept shuddering in

delight, but—I just couldn’t relax enough to come.

He rocked above me, olive skin slick with sweat against my paler hue. He was beautiful, goddammit, and the sex was hot, but my mind wasn’t all there. No matter how much I fought him or gave in to him in turns, I couldn’t fuck away my fears.

I thought about faking it, but that’d be a disservice to all womankind. So I fought against him harder, found his mouth with mine, biting him back till he was too distracted to stop himself. He thrust into me hard, harder, hardest, until he came with a gasping exhalation deep inside of me.

He lay above me for a moment, sweat dripping from his chest onto mine. Then he carefully rolled off me, to my side. I saw him inspecting me by the lamplight my blinds let in. Maybe he hadn’t even really looked at me until now. I brought my hands down from above my head, my arms sore, and rested one hand on my cheek, the other on my chest.

“You should come too—” he said, and reached down my stomach toward the space between my legs.

“No, that’s okay.” I caught his hand with mine. “It’s just one of those nights.”

He brought my freshly scarred left hand up in his and inspected it by the lamplight outside. “What’s this? Did I hurt you?”

It was Mr. November’s mark upon me, Anna’s bite, and my suture scars. Everything I’d tried to throw away from me tonight had followed me home. I shook my head. “It was an accident.” I clasped my hand into a fist. He turned my hand toward him and kissed my closed fingers lightly before releasing them back to me.

He rocked up to sitting, and then to standing by the side of the bed. Everything he did was fluid—I wondered if he’d lied about not dancing, before.

“I’ve got to go.”

I laughed, and made a show of covering a yawn. “Fine, Cinderella. I was just about to kick you out.”

He paused from the labor of his belt buckle and looked at me again. “You know, you’re the first girl who’s said that that I think meant it. What’s your name?”

I shook my head. “No names. You know where the door is. Forget the address on your way out.”

“Ahhh. A tough girl, eh?”

“Quite,” I said, and pointed down the hall.

Rating: 1 Kiss