Treasured by the Hunter: A Post-Apocalyptic Alien Romance by Lynnea Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
ZOEY
Treasured by the Hunter
Years after the end of the world, my life is falling apart again. This time, I know exactly how to survive in the bugpocalypse. What I don’t know is what to do with the brawny purple alien following me around.
Harb’k isn’t just big and strong, with a protective streak a mile wide, but he’s funny as hell too. I agree to partner up with him at least until I get to my destination, a settlement called Sanctuary. But before we get there, we come across something that could make or break humanity’s future.
Will we be able to contain the threat? Even if we do, will Harb’k still want me if he finds out my secret?
HARB’K
Almost every hunter in my group found his mate but me. Desperate to get away from all the love in the air, I volunteer to scour the region for signs that the scourge—the abominations that brought us to Earth—are evolving. Instead, I discover a lone female navigating the ravaged landscape with enemies at her back.
I convince Zoey to travel with me. She doesn’t know it yet, but she is my mate, and the mate bond is never wrong.
I will move planets for her, but first, I must save this one. Can I convince her to love me before a deadly mutagen destroys everything?
The bug and zombie apocalypse!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 🖤💙💜💚🩷
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: ☹️😋😀😘🥰
The heroine: Zoey – since the bugpocalypse happened six years ago, she has been living with a nomadic survivor group that moved from place to place, foraging for whatever they could find and often trading with the bigger settlements for things they needed. Her group most often traded with the Sanctuary settlement but was going to start moving toward the Franklin settlement since they were able to rid their town of the nearby nest by working with the Xarc’n hunters.
The Hero: Harb’k – he is from the group of humans and Xarc’n who live and hunt in the Great Plains. They have converted a mini mall to be their base and work to eliminate the alien bugs that have a large nest nearby. The bugs have quite a lot of food stored in their nest because the plains was cattle country when the scourge first arrived. Harb’k had recently been patrolling farther out because he was the one of the few Xarc’n at the base that hadn’t yet found his mate, and he was sick of watching all the love when he still had none.
The story: Zoey’s leader, Connor was pretty open minded about things like the fact that people in Franklin were working with the Xarc’n, but recently his brother Corey had been hanging around and he was from a rogue group who were all recently killed by a Xarc’n warrior and he has some different views. Though most of the group know that Corey’s old group did awful things and most likely deserved what they got, especially since they targeted the warriors and stole their shuttles more than once. When Connor returns one night with friends and kills his brother and some of the others, tying to take the women to offer as gifts to join a militia, Zoey and the other woman run, planning to sabotage Connor and his friends if they try to steal from their other safe houses.
Harb’k came across Zoey a few days back and he knew from her scent that she was his mate. When he saw that she was traveling without her group and that there were some males following her, he tried to step in to help, though Zoey was having none of that. He eventually wears her down and they start traveling together. I liked that she wasn’t so easy to sway to go live with him at his community. She had planned on meeting back up with her friend and staying with one of the other groups.
“It wasn’t just the bugs we had to worry about, but the fungus that worked hand in hand with them. Eating or drinking anything contaminated with it was a death sentence.
First, you get these sores all over your body that smell horrendous, and then you either turn into a slow, brain-dead zombie or a fast, angry one, attacking everyone around you and spreading the disease. Then, when you were ripe for the picking and oozing the fungus from every pore, the stench called in the bugs to finish the job.”
Not only do these main characters have to worry about the zombie fungus, but they have to worry about little pieces of space junk that fell to earth from the mining vessel that had been overrun with mutant fungus. They didn’t know what exactly it was, but the hunter groups and their tech wizards knew that whatever it was, the bugs wanted it, and they had a good idea that it would be something that would again mutate the bugs into stronger foes.
This was the last of the books in this series and the mountains spinoff series so I was kind of hoping that the hunter groups would really start to turn the earth around and defeating the scourge, but it looks like things are just changing. I hope there are either more books in this series or another spinoff series, because Lynnea Lee has really done a fantastic job with this world. I have loved every one of these books, there is just the right amount of action, adventure, suspense, and great storylines in addition to huge hunky male Heroes and steamy romance.
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