Accidentally Orc-ward by Lucee Joie

3/5 stars

I’m in two minds about this book. On one hand, I love a good steamy monster romance. On the other hand, this was rather clunky.

Mabel is a monster hunter who works for King Gilberd. Changed as punishment for her father’s actions, she’s forced to do the king’s bidding, and he commands her to kill the orc who killed one of his warlords. She tracks down the orc, but can’t find it in herself to kill him…instead, she wants to do him! But the king won’t take this failure lying down….

This gets steamy fairly quickly, which is fine for an instalove, but there’s not really a whole lot of reason for these two to be together. It’s a bit longer than your typical instalove, so I wanted to see a little more development and chemistry outside of the bedroom between the two main characters.  It seems like Brugo gave Mabel a heated look, and suddenly, she’s questioning everything she’s ever desired. And for being a successful monster hunter, Mabel never really came across as such or dangerous or ruthless.

The writing itself could’ve used another pass through editing. There were some words used here and there that didn’t really belong; the author was going for one thing but ended up with something entirely different because of a misused word. There were several typos, too (public hair, as an example) that kinda took me out of the story a bit.

This wasn’t a bad story by any means, and I’ll read more of the author’s work, but it didn’t quite get where I wanted it to for me to be fully satisfied.