Interestingly, on her website at http://www.jjmassa.com, J.J. Massa has nifty little character profiles to read about the key characters in her three published books plus a section about the Montgomery family, which I assume is her upcoming series. As far as I can tell, the three books highlighted on the website are related through some of the characters though the stories are independent.

Everyone Has a Weak Spot is a story of outsiders looking for belonging. Lorelei and her half-brother Renaud are the offspring of a breeding experiment. They spend their lives in strange familial estrangement and in furtive flight from the scientists who wanted to continue long-term genetic experimentation on the siblings.

Lorelei is a petite ballerina who has moved to sweltering Louisiana to be near her half-brother, but a fender bender brings her to the attention of Renaud's uncle War, Sheriff Warrick Martine. The scene where he frisks her is just about the hottest hook I have ever read. There's the little t-shirt she's wearing, and his roaming hands, but there's also a connection between them that is electric.

War is a great character--a Dominant man in a uniform who is smart enough to know his nephew Renaud is no threat where Lorelei is concerned, sensitive enough to know that the two young people are hiding something from him, and lupine enough to want to protect them both from whatever secret threat they're fleeing from.

And even though Renaud is War's nephew, War doesn't know about the half siblings' paternal genetics, which make Renaud and Lorelei exclusive targets of foreign scientists. It is a good thing that War had spent ten years as part of Delta Force attached to the 82nd Airborne Division, because he has a secret cache of knowledge (and manpower) that is the very thing Lorelei needs. But the special thing about this book is not what the characters are individually but who they are when they are together.

The burning question for the reader is whether or not they will figure out that, in this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The chemistry between Lorelei and War is so volatile it just about sizzles right off the page. This is a very sexy paranormal werewolf story with a high level of physical and dramatic tension that will have the reader on the edge of her seat unable to put it down until the very last word.

Reviewed By Maitresse
© December 2004

This review refers to a previously published version of this book.