CW: Mention of SA with no details

Title: A Lick of Frost
Series: Merry Gentry
Author: Laurell K. Hamilton
Date Added: June 3, 2014
Date Started: November 1, 2018
Date DNF: November 1, 2018
Genre: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Paranormal Romance

Pages: 342
Publication Date: October 23, 2017
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Media: Paperback (Library)

I am Meredith Gentry, princess and heir apparent to the throne in the realm of faerie, onetime private investigator in the mortal world. To be crowned queen, I must first continue the royal bloodline and give birth to an heir of my own. If I fail, my aunt, Queen Andais, will be free to do what she most desires: install her twisted son, Cel, as monarch . . . and kill me.

My royal guards surround me, and my best loved-my Darkness and my Killing Frost-are always beside me, sworn to protect and make love to me. But still the threat grows greater. For despite all my carnal efforts, I remain childless, while the machinations of my sinister, sadistic Queen and her confederates remain tireless. So my bodyguards and I have slipped back into Los Angeles, hoping to outrun the gathering shadows of court intrigue. But even exile isn’t enough to escape the grasp of those with dark designs.

Now King Taranis, powerful and vainglorious ruler of faerie’s Seelie Court, has leveled accusations against my noble guards of a heinous crime-and has gone so far as to ask the mortal authorities to prosecute. If he succeeds, my men face extradition to faerie and the hideous penalties that await them there. But I know that Taranis’s charges are baseless, and I sense that his true target is me. He tried to kill me when I was a child. Now I fear his intentions are far more terrifying. 

I decided to give Laurell K. Hamilton’s Merry Gentry series another try, considering I’d ready well over ten of her Anita Blake books before I noped out due to nearly all of the plot being replaced by porn.  MG seemed to go down that slippery slope much quicker than Anita Blake did, as I believe there’s a scene in one of the earlier books where Merry and company are running from a monster or something and they stop to fuck in a hallway *facepalm*.  I’d barely finished the prior book in Anita Blake, Mistral’s Kiss, which I gave one star, and looking back at my Goodreads’ ratings now even the one before that, A Stroke of Midnight, only received two, so I wasn’t going into this with any high expectations.

But his hair was uniquely his own, silver, like metal beaten into hair.

I didn’t think it was possible to describe silver hair in such a boring way.  Like really?  *sigh* And I fully consider I may be too harsh as I have my own way of describing silver hair that Laurell K Hamilton (who is a best selling author whereas I’m an unpublished nobody) could utterly abhor (“moonlight and ashes” is my go to lol).  Maybe I’m being overly critical because the Goodreads rating of this entry is overwhelmingly positive at a 4.14 average, but I had zero interest in Frost, whom I’m 100% certain could pass for a Sephiroth clone (like…a legitimate one, not the FFVII mistranslation of “clone”) just with grey eyes.

Eh, close enough
Image Source (right)

I didn’t even finish the first chapter, which seemed to be some sort of deposition because King Taranis of the Seelie Court has done something unprecedented in bringing charges against another fae to the human authorities in accusing three of Merry’s guards of raping a Seelie Court woman, but Merry knows they didn’t do it.  This is such an interesting conundrum because the fae can’t lie, so what’s going on?  But the plot is so plodding I just don’t care.

When I first DNF’s this, I looked at it as the sign it was time for me to wash my hands of Merry Gentry novels even as I planned to give the next Anita Blake book a try, though I have the same issues with that series as I do MG, and it turns out the next AB (at the time) was about her possibly being pregnant and the implications of all that.

There is an Anita Blake graphic novel series that focuses on the older and much better novels, which I’m stoked to read, especially considering how hot Jean-Claude looks on the cover 😍

Unless LKH does something radically different with her novels, I’m done with them except for the ones above, and since she neither reads reviews nor cares a wit for critiques I doubt that will happen.  I understand avoiding reviews to a point, but some of the critiques are valid.  However, there are people who will continue to buy her novels either out of loyalty, sunk cost, “hate” review potential, or they genuinely enjoy them and don’t have a problem with smut replacing plot.  I’m just not one of those people.

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