RUNNER'S MOON: CHALLA gets 5 Kisses from TwoLipsReviews!

Challa’s memories of her life before escaping the Arra seven years ago with thirty other Ruinos aren’t happy ones. Unfortunately, her life for the past two years with Lawson Hall’s Carnival and Sideshow hasn’t been much better. Starving and so weak the night Lawson caught her raiding his kitchen that she couldn’t change into her human form to disguise herself, Lawson turned her into a sideshow attraction as Challa, the Alien Girl. She was the draw he’d needed to save his struggling carnival. In return, he’d provided her with everything she needed to live, but he’d also caged her again, just in a different way. He didn’t care about her. All he cared about were the gate receipts she brought in. When she discovers her destined life mate in the audience at their first show of the weekend in the small town of Cooper, she knows there’s no way Lawson’s going to let her stay with him.

Former Army Lt. Compton Scott, medically discharged after an RPG left him without a right leg — not to mention scarred and nearly neutered — had come home to Cooper and his family farm to wallow in his self-pity. It takes his best friend dragging him out to the carnival on a blind date to finally get him out of the house. The woman who garners his interest, however, is not his date, but the green-skinned woman that the sideshow barker claims is a real, live alien. He thinks she certainly looks the part. Hissing and growling through her needle-like teeth, she reaches through the bars of her cage, slashing with lethal-looking talons at the gawking crowd, a crowd that backs hastily away from her in abject terror. Danger, however, isn’t what Comp picks up from her. He sees the sadness in her beautiful purple-blue eyes, and she smells so good, like honeysuckle, he wants...no, needs to get closer to her. He gets exactly that when she draws blood from one of her spectators and notice from local law enforcement. To protect her, Comp secrets her away in his home.

Challa knows they must make love to bond, but when the proof that they are indeed blood mates doesn’t materialize, she knows their future together isn’t meant to be. Sadly, knowing she’ll never see her beloved Compton again, she returns to the carnival under the guise of fetching her things. Frantic when the carnival picks up and leaves town ahead of schedule, taking Challa with them, Comp knows he must find her. Her alien nature aside, in just one night of sexually explosive passion, he knows Challa is his destiny. What he can’t even begin to imagine is how important it is to find her, sooner than later. As luck would have it, some of Challa’s fellow escapees, as well as their mates and trusted friends, step in to help, but in gathering together, they once again attract the Arra’s attention. Since coming to Earth, Challa’s friends have fought the Arra slavers off several times, but this time, the unrelenting aliens have come in search of the Ruinos and their blood mates with a deadlier weapon than any of them had ever seen. One that will test Comp’s military training to the nth degree. And then some!

Challa is the fourth installment in Linda Mooney’s terrific Runner’s Moon series. Also including Jebaral, Tiron and Simolif — these books will capture your imagination and inspire a desire in you to read more Runner’s Moon books from Ms. Mooney as soon as possible. You’ll want to keep reading Challa until you’ve finished it. Although part of a series, you can read it alone, but I wouldn’t recommend it. For deeper enjoyment of the plot and characters, I’d advise readers to start with Jebaral and progress through the books in order. Believe me, you’ll enjoy meeting the recurring characters in their own books before reading about Challa in hers.

Challa is one of those books you just can’t put down, but of course it is; it’s a Linda Mooney book! Like everything she writes, this story is captivating from beginning to end, but then, frankly I think Ms. Mooney could draw you into a scene about taking out the garbage. She’s just that kind of writer. Her plots are riveting, and she makes you feel her characters, right down to their toenails. Ms. Mooney didn’t have to say outright that Comp’s prosthesis was painful. I knew it; could almost feel it in my own bones from the way he walked and from Challa sensing his need for strength and then feeding him her own.

I love how all the Ruinos have such a strong core sense of devotion to their mates. Their emotional love scenes really cut to the heart, making the reader sigh with pure pleasure. Add raw danger and compelling suspense in a smooth flow of prose and dialogue, all of it moving at a fast pace, and you have more than just a really good book. You have a Linda Mooney book, a book that spins a story you shouldn’t miss.

Along with the first three books in the Runner’s Moon series, Challa is definitely a keeper. And since there are at least eight more Ruinos out there looking for mates, I hope to see many more releases in this wonderful series.

TwoLipsReviews Gives WINGS OF THUNDER 5 Kisses!

Once again, Linda Mooney has worked her singular magic, creating a fantastic close to her Thunder trilogy with Wings of Thunder, a riveting story filled with unswerving love, edge-of-the-seat danger and one man’s disturbing obsession.

After two years away from Earth, Annabel Lee Mayall — known to the winged people of Parra as Grand Lady Annie — was homesick. Although she’d accepted her life on Parra, with its tangerine sky, twin suns and two moons; its blue grass and crystal towers; its odd foods and even odder customs, she missed the taste of ice cream, apple pie and corn-on-the-cob dripping with butter. She missed the blue sky, the green grass and the majestic Montana mountains she’d once called home. She was still just as much in love with her husband Rion as she ever had been, and she was completely devoted to her baby son, Kerr. Yet she hungered for home so desperately that Rion, Grand Lord of Thunder — the winged man who’d tumbled out of the stormy Montana sky and into her heart three years before — worries for her health.

When the granddaddy of all storms, a tosis, obliterated Parra’s capital city and opened more rifts — the inter-dimensional pathways between Earth and Parra — than the Lords of Thunder could cover, a biplane from Earth is pulled through one of the rifts. The fierce winds bring the Gloster Gladiator down in Parra’s destroyed capital, leaving Royal Air Force Wing Commander Ian Davenport alive but badly injured. Awakening days later in a strange hospital, he was greeted by the loveliest woman he’d ever seen. Her name, she told him, was Annie. And she told him something else as well, that he was on another planet, a place called Parra. He could have been in Heaven for all the angels buzzing around the oddly colored sky, but from the moment he laid eyes on Annie, he didn’t care where he was as long as Annie was there. For Ian, it was love at first sight, but for Annie, the Brit airman was a catharsis for her homesickness, the remedy for what ailed her. Someone from home...well, at least someone from Earth, who could tell her all the latest news, not the least of which was how the war with Hitler and Tojo was going.

Rion feared his beloved Annie was getting herself in deeper with the Earthman than she realized, first visiting him in the hospital and then at his hangar as he pieced his damaged flying machine back together. Rion knew the man was in love with Annie. He didn’t need to hear the gossip about them to know as much. All he had to do was look at the man to know he felt about Annie and that he planned to take her back to Earth with him once his airplane was repaired and a rift opened for them. Would she go, leaving Rion and their son behind? He knew how homesick she was, and now she had a way to go home and somebody to take her there.

What’s more, a sudden and undiagnosable disease was opening painful sores on Annie’s back. Parra’s best healers were of the opinion that something on Parra was causing the progressive disease and that if she stayed it would only get worse. But if she went back to Earth, perhaps it would heal itself. Or perhaps healers there had a remedy for the malady. But could Rion force himself to let her go? After all they’d been through to be together, could he watch her get into Davenport’s flying machine and fly away from him for all time? Would that be any less painful than watching her die a slow, painful death in his arms? When Ian finds a way to take the decision out of his hands, Rion will be forced to face the fight of his life and Annie will have to make a choice between two men who love her beyond distraction. Which one will live? And which one will die?

Ms. Mooney began telling Rion and Annie’s story in Lord of Thunder, continued it in Passion of Thunder and brings it to a thrilling close in Wings of Thunder. This three-part serial needs to be read in order of release for the best possible enjoyment and appreciation of the continuing story arc as Rion and Annie fall in love and discover several times over that their love is worth fighting anyone or anything to hang on to. The desire between these two virtually jumps off the pages. They create sizzling, sensual love scenes in the bedroom or wherever else they choose to have sex. They’re not exhibitionists, but they have no qualms about making love veritably under the noses of others. Annie is the strong pioneer type, the last of a dying breed from the American West of the early 1940’s. While most homesick women would have wallowed in self-pity, the experience only adds strength to Annie’s character.

Determined to share her life with Rion, however long it may or may not be, is what she intends to do, come hell or high water. Rion is my ultimate hero, muscle and marshmallow, a hard-bodied man with a soft heart, at least when it comes to Annie. I really felt for him when he had to face the possibility of once again losing Annie, this time to another man. You can’t help but like Ian and wonder how he could have gone so wrong when he started out so right. It was a question I wish Ms. Mooney had answered.

Although I haven’t given Wings of Thunder the Recommended Read I gave both preceding books in this series, it’s nonetheless a must read at 5 kisses. In this reviewer’s humble opinion, no one writes more touching, heartfelt romances than Linda Mooney. She can haul you right into the story and make you feel her characters’ desires, happiness, passion and sadness better than any author I’ve ever read. That said, I’d love to see her write a spinoff Thunder series about a grown up Kerr, the next generation Lord of Thunder.