Shattered Days by C.L. Quinn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

He’d never really be all right again, but it was what he deserved after the war. He was broken, he knew it. Life messed you up, and all that was left to do was the best you can to survive.

Yeah, he was messed up, but so was she, worse than he could ever imagine. Any chance that two people so shattered could help each other to heal and learn to love? Especially when one is human…and one is not.

Tamesine had a past that she couldn’t remember, and was afraid to try, because nearly 800 years ago, tragedy drove her beyond sanity. Now, she wanted to be well and whole again…and in L.A. the universe provided an answer. He walked into her dreams, literally…a stranger, human, no less…and that should never have been possible. But there he was, in as much need as she was. Pain had ripped them apart from their paths. Perhaps they had been brought together for a greater destiny.  Book 7, Tamesine’s story, one of the most powerful vampires on Earth, and a man from Wisconsin who doesn’t think he should be alive at all, continues the journey of the first blood vampires that began in Forbidden Days.

Evil villains with nine lives!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 🖤💙❤️
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: ☹️😮😋😉🥰
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Solo Narration

The heroine: Tamesine – she is a vampire, one of the firsts, and one of the strongest of all of them. When her twin sister killed her, her mind broke. She somehow survived, and recently she found out that she may have been pregnant at the time which is the only way a vampire has ever survived a near beheading. Though that was a few centuries ago. She has gotten better recently with the help of some good friends and the fact that she connected with a baby, also one of the firsts. When she started to have nightmares again, she didn’t want her mind to break again and possibly hurt someone. So she left her friends. She is now working in a small diner in Los Angeles.

The Hero: Mark – he works as a bartender at a bar called the Iron Butterfly. Has worked there for the last six months, for a man named Joe, though Mark doesn’t technically need the money, he liked to feel like he is doing something. He has severe PTSD from his time in the military and he considers himself a mess and broken. He had horrible nightmares and knew that Joe wanted him to get professional help, but he didn’t want to because he didn’t want to relive his past for someone else and he knew a psychologist or psychiatrist would want him to talk about it.

The Story: When Mark goes to eat dinner at the diner where Tamesine works, he felt something strange when Tamesine came up to him. Tamesine felt something when she saw Mark as well. She couldn’t figure it out, and wasn’t sure if it was because he looked troubled or if it was something else. Later on after she was done working, her boss made her promise she would take it easy and go get a drink at the bar nearby. She walked through the alley and finds three men assaulting a woman. She saves the woman, but didn’t notice Mark by the garbage can watching after he heard a scream. He saw this tiny little waitress pick up each of the guys and throw them. He wasn’t sure if he was hallucination or what. Though he didn’t think so.

I have been really enjoying this series so far, the world building is terrific as is the character development. The supporting characters are great and I like the fact that so many of them keep showing up in each book. They are like a big family. Lamont, the wealthy owner of the Supernatural Research Society, appears in this book again. He is evil, he has a serum that can knock out and weaken a vampire, even a first blood vampire. He also has powers of his own since he drank nearly a gallon of the blood of five different first blood vampires. So obviously his hatred of the vampires stemmed from Jealousy. Tamesine worked with Lamont for over thirty years while she was cuckoo for coco puffs, she helped him keep Daniel (another first blood vampire) hostage and torture him for most of that time. Lamont knows that Tamesine is super powerful and he wants to use her blood to change him into a vampire.

One thing that really bothers me in some books is when the characters do stupid things. Like when they have a villain who they know is beyond redemption and instead of just killing him or her, they just leave them alive and you just know it will be a mistake, that the villain will some how get away and come back to do something even worse. They do that more than a once in this book. But overall, the plot was good and there was a ton of action. Like previous books, the main characters end up all over the place, from Los Angeles, to Paris, to Tasmania and more.

This audiobook was told in multiple points of view and was narrated in solo narration by Pyper Down. I usually hate solo narration, but I like her voice and style, so I am not minding it so much. This series has been so interesting which has also helped. This is my third of the series via audiobook and I have been enjoying them and are not sick of them yet.

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