Mine to Possess

Singh continues to impress me with her Psy-Changeling world! She's built a cool world set in a future where mankind has evolved mentally and psychically, with "humans" caught somewhere in the middle. (They're all human, really- but the Psy's and Changlings are bit more!)The only thing is- I didn't enjoy this one as much as the first three.I had "issues" with the heroine.Talin and Clay have known each other since they were children. But one blood soaked day, Clay went berserk protecting her from an abusive foster father, landing himself in jail and scarring her for life. Believing her dead, he eventually joined up with the Darkriver pack, the feline Changeling pack of Lucas and Sascha (Slave to Sensation) and Faith and Vaughn (Visions of Heat).Now, years later, Tally has decided to overcome her fears and look for him. She desperately needs too, because someone is harming the children she protects and he's still the strongest man she's ever known.Talin is a wounded heroine. Intelligent and sensitive, she suffered great damage at the hands of her abuser and because of what Clay did that fateful day, she's erected walls against him, (and the world, for that matter), to keep herself sane.I am glad to see Singh was consistent in giving Talin the natural defenses adult survivors of child abuse usually set up. What I didn't buy, was the reasons for Talin's distancing herself from Clay. She had to have known he did what he did to protect her, and her fearful reactions to him, even years later, got on my nerves.I liked Clay a lot. He's on the edge, being separated so long from Talin, but that's what endeared him to me. I liked his protectiveness, and even his possessiveness. I just wish he had been paired with someone who matched him.The "missing children showing up dead" plot line worked for me, although I was curious throughout the story as to how that connected with the illness she had and "odd scent" Clay kept picking up on with Talin- because there was obviously a connection. In the end, it all made sense to the rules Singh's been establishing in her world, but I totally saw it going a different way- though I couldn't put my finger on what.This book's strength is the further development of the Psy/Changeling world. I did like the way she incorporated the regular old humans into their world, and appreciated how she established the psy-changelings' need for them. As others have noted, this book marks a turning point for the Psy's- they're losing their grip on power and are getting desperate to keep it. And. The Changelings are gaining strength. I'm anxious to see how it all pans out!I'm giving this one a 3.8 out of 5. Good, but not as engaging for me as the previous ones!

Talin McKade has known Clay Bennett since her childhood, but when one night she see's the true nature of what Clay could become she lives her life in terror. But she is now a grown woman and goes to find Clay to help her and innocents for she can no longer do it on her own. She needs help from someone that she knows that can. Children from the streets have been kidnapped and turning up dead on the streets, and Talin is at a loss as to what to do now. Now one of the children that she has grown very close to has dissapeared and she wants to find him before he turns up dead as well. So she finds Clay and is filled with fear once more. Clay is no longer the boy she once knew, who saved her from a monster. Clay Bennett is a sentinel of the DarkRiver, and has a young boy grew close to a young woman that he bonded close with. However when he releases the animal side of himself that he had tried to hide from, and kill the one that was abusing Talin, he loses the one person that he ever felt close to, his best friend, believing later that she died he is now faced with the fact that he was lied to, and Talin has been alive all this time. Now a sentinel with responsibilities, Talin comes to him for his help and he has a great need to possess and claim her. Clay never wants to let her go, and vows to himself that she will never leave him again. But they must find the truth and find the lost children before it is too late....I truly enjoyed reading this, and the more I read Nalini Singh the more and more I want to read the rest of her. She has such a great talent to portray her stories and relationships within them so vividly alive that you feel drawn into the book and taken into a new world with danger and passion that will excite and enthrall you. I just started reading her books and I am so glad that I decided to start reading her. At first I didn't know if I would like reading her, but I have heard such great things, and I have to say that they are all 100% true. Nalini Singh will surprise and delight you!

Months months months to finish.. Idk why. Just really dragged so much.

This was definitely my least favorite of the series so far. As I said in an update, I just could not get into the romance and I really didn't like our male lead, Clay. The mystery element also was really watered down but this books own introduction. This intro basically gave the plot away, at least in my opinion. Normally, I don't really care about spoilers and am totally fine with finding out plot points about a book prior to reading but I think in this case I was more annoyed because the book spoiled itself. Also as a note, this book deals with abuse of a child.

To get into the romance a bit, I was trying to work through why I didn't like this romance as much. Almost every book in this series thus far has the male character sort of pushing the female character past where they say their comfortable. It didn't bother me in those books but it did bother me here and I'll try to parse out why. In the past books, some of the main characters, typically the Psy character, were convinced that they physically wouldn't be able to handle a physical relationship and that's why their partner had to push them. Brenna from the previous book is probably most similar to Tally. They both have gone through a trauma that makes them really reluctant to be physical. However with Brenna, Judd also had reasons to be hesitant of forging a connection where in this book, Clay had no such reservations and was also really judgemental of Tally's past sexual history. Clay is genuinely angry at the fact that Tally has many past sexual partners and that just made me feel really bad considering why Tally did that. Since Tally's trauma is really wrapped up in sex and a lack of control in sexual situations, I just couldn't give Clay's boundary pushing the benefit of the doubt like I could in previous books and that made me really dislike Clay.

I don't actually have that much to say about Tally; she mostly washed over me. I like that we finally got a human love interest and she was the catalyst for introducing us to new parts of the world that seems like it will be really interesting. There was her sickness that we're introduced to early on that I thought would play a bigger part but actually just disappeared for the whole middle part (which is the same thing that happened with the idea that Clay was close to going rogue, which was introduced and then never came up again). I think that some of her story could be impactful to people but I just could not connect to her in this story.

As I signaled, the plot of this let me down. The pacing of the mystery and insertion of the politics of the world felt a bit off to me here. A lot more of this book focuses solely on Clay and Tally and doesn't include the rest of the pack compared to other books and I found myself missing that pack element. Maybe this was because I didn't like the relationship as much but to me it felt like the child kidnapping plot was introduced and then it went away for a bit and then a while later they got everyone else involved but only after they realized a certain connection this disappearances had. The second half is significantly better in this regard than this first, which I think is why I found the pacing a bit uneven. We also barely check in with the Psy council in this book and I would have liked to see them folded in more.

This is not a bad book and I still enjoyed parts of it and read it pretty quickly. It's just a step down from previous books. It was a few small complaints and then the larger complaint of really disliking Clay that added up to a above average rating. Honestly, it's a credit to Singh that I can really dislike the male love interest and still give a romance three stars but I'm hoping this is the bottom and the books are only up from here.

This book's couple focus is on a male changeling and a human woman that were friends when they were small children but due to horrific events he was led to believe that she was dead. Talin approaches Clay because she needs someone to help her find who is taking the children After the shock of finding out she is alive and hid it from him he agrees to help. Turns out the dead kids were discovered by the corporation Shine and given help or scholarships. Shine it turns out is run by the descendants of Psy that decided not to follow Silence when it was enacted. They have been hunted down ever since and now they are trying to find people that might have some Psy powers but don't know how to control it. I could have cared less about the romance but this book really developed the overall human side of the story that has been missing in the previous books.

Mine to Possess, the fourth full-length installment of Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling series was an awesome read that was jam-packed with excitement. In it, we have the enigmatic Clay, a DarkRiver sentinel who has always been a loner in danger of giving in to his beast nature and going rogue (taking his animal form and never turning back to human again). He’s reunited with Talin, his best friend since childhood and the human female he’s always thought of as his, when she comes looking for him in the hope that he can help her find the culprit who’s killing off the street kids she works with. Tainted by their respective checkered pasts and not sure if they can trust one another, they form an uneasy alliance that gradually heats up into a passionate romantic relationship. But meanwhile, Talin finds herself a target of the killer who wants her to stop investigating the murders, and not surprisingly, it all ties back to the Psy Council. This story really hit the spot, not only with a deep and emotional romance for our main couple, but by also adding a lot to the overall series story arc that I can tell is headed toward an eventual dismantling of the Psy Council and Silence.Talin was an orphan who became friends with Clay when she was only three years old and he was nine. They both lived in the same slum neighborhood, and although she was somewhat afraid of him at first, she came to his rescue when he broke his leg and no one else was around. After that, they were nearly inseparable, but several years later, when Clay found out that Tally’s foster father was abusing her, his inner beast came out, brutally killing the man. Afterward, Clay went to juvie while Tally was adopted by a good family who lived far away. However, Tally had borne witness to Clay’s savage nature that day, and fearing that he might someday turn on her, she asked her social worker to tell Clay she was dead. Two decades later, she is now a social worker herself, helping street kids through an organization that helped her in the past. Several of her kids have gone missing and some have turned up dead, so Tally seeks out the one man she knows is strong enough to take on the murderer and find one of her kids before the teen is killed, too. Their reunion isn’t exactly a happy one, though. Tally finds that she’s still fearful around the man that she used to call her friend, but at the same time, he stirs emotions and desires in her that she’s never experienced before. Tally is a very complex heroine, and the threads of her characterization are masterfully woven throughout the story as she gradually comes to trust Clay again and accept that they were always meant for one another. There are so many things I’d love to say about her, but I can’t without giving away major spoilers, because she harbors several secrets that eventually come out. But I loved how she and Clay managed to work through all of them. I also loved her dedication to the kids in her care and how she was willing to risk everything for them. She was a wonderful character who exhibited the perfect mix of vulnerability and strength that has quite possibly made her my favorite heroine of the series so far.Clay grew up with a single human mother and never knew his changeling father. Although he loved his mother, she was never quite able to accept his animal nature. He tried as best he could to suppress it, but living within four walls inside a city was difficult for the predator in him. Everything combined made him an angry loner who had no real friends until little Tally came along. She became a beacon of light to him and he became her protector. He doesn’t regret killing her foster father, but he does blame himself for not realizing what was happening sooner. Then after being released from prison, he was told she was dead, and his world imploded. Luckily the DarkRiver pack found him and took him in, but he’s continued to pretty much keep to himself and many times has felt like he might end up going rogue. When Tally suddenly reappears in his life, he’s angry with her for lying to him and staying away so long, but at the same time, he feels compelled to help her. After all she is his Tally, the one woman his beast has known belonged to him for most of his life. It takes some time for him to work through her fear and all the bombshells she drops on him, as well as his own anger, but he gradually does. In the early chapters, he’s kind of a jerk a couple of times, but ultimately I understood where his frustration was coming from and was able to forgive his conduct. He also proves to be surprisingly patient for a changeling male, taking time to help Tally overcome her issues, which helped me to feel much better about him. As the story progressed, he became the perfect mix of alpha protector and passionate lover, who ends up wearing his heart on his sleeve for Tally, which made me place him at or near the top as one of my favorite heroes of the series so far.As with all the other Psy-Changeling books, there are supporting characters aplenty, many of whom have their own stories. From previous books, Lucas and Sascha (Slave to Sensation), Nate and Tamsyn (“Beat of Temptation” from Wild Invitation), Vaughn and Faith (Visions of Heat), and Judd and Brenna (Caressed by Ice) all make appearances, each with varying degrees of significance to the plot. Dorian, the pretty boy and latent DarkRiver sentinel, pairs up with Clay in a number of scenes as they deal with various threats together. Ashaya, an M-Psy who is working on the Protocol I project for the Psy Council, makes some surprising decisions. Dorian and Ashaya meet in this book, albeit off canvas. I could sense a bit of an attraction, at least on Dorian’s part, so I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find out that they become the hero and heroine of the next book, Hostage to Pleasure. Devraj Santos, Talin’s boss and the head of the organization she works for, becomes the hero of book #7, Blaze of Memory, and Max, an Enforcer (their futuristic version of police) who comes to Tally’s aid when her apartment is vandalized, becomes the hero of book #8, Bonds of Justice. I liked both of these men and look forward to reading their stories. We also get a couple of brief scenes with Mercy, heroine of book #6, Branded by Fire; Ria, Lucas’s assistant and heroine of the prequel novella, Whisper of Sin; as well as Kaleb, the newest Psy Council member and hero of book #12, Heart of Obsidian. I’m beginning to suspect him of certain activities and very much look forward to unraveling his motivations in the coming installments.Overall, Mine to Possess was an awesome read that didn’t disappoint in the least. I loved Clay and Tally both as individual characters, while the romance between them is deep and heartfelt. I’m a sucker for both friends-to-lovers stories and reunion romances, both of which are strong tropes in this book. Their long-time bond, while a little battered from time apart, had survived, and with a little care and nurturing, flared back to life. It also made their emotional connection a very strong one. The mystery of who was kidnapping and murdering the kids was woven seamlessly throughout and completely engaged my attention as I waited for it all to unravel. Perhaps best of all, was the advancement of the overall story arc, which was possibly even stronger in this book than all the ones before it. At the very least, it added a great deal to the story and built wonderfully on all the others. I can’t wait to see how everything turns out and very much look forward to continuing the series to find out.

Not keen on the slut-shaming, to be honest.

I like this series, but I had a problem with the heroine in this book; I just didn't like her and felt that the hero deserved someone more worthy of him. However, while I wasn't thrilled by the romance, I really enjoyed the storyline and I'm looking forward to the next one.