Book Review Of The Month – Savage Beauty #1

Moonstone

Writer Mike Bullock

Here’s a question for you all, for your job, you got to go to the plains and jungle areas of Africa. You have to photograph the scenery and animals for a magazine (I know, sucky job all around). But you had the opportunity to stop something illegal happening. Would you? The reason why I ask is because I want you to get into the mindset of what happens in Savage Beauty, a new series from Moonstone Books. Two women take on the image of a jungle goddess to defend the people there from just generally bad people.

There’re a lot of things I liked about this book. For starters is that the two main characters have a real feel to them. They don’t show them talking to animals or something cliché, I’ll exclude the fur bikinis they are wearing. Also, how they got there makes sense, as does their fighting style when they do fight. Looking at the art, it doesn’t take you off to Africa but for what the story is, I like it. As most of us know, with any first book, everything is just being laid down and everything is going to build from there. At the end of this book, they point out this is a fictional situation but it does happen in real life and is something that needs to be addressed, I agree.

Now, there are a few things that didn’t work for me. There were no real accents to go with the characters. One character is French, but there was no change in his dialect then that of the African characters around them. Now, again, this could just be me but I like to know why your antagonist is evil. Now I haven’t met any African warlords or illegal arms dealers and really don’t want to but I want to know how they got to that level of evilness. Overall, it has potential and I’d like to see where it goes. In my humble opinion, pick it up and tell me what you think.