I came to Lion’s Heat with some general expectations. I had read the previous books in the series and was interested in Jonas’s story, but didn’t have any particular hopes for his own mating. Nonetheless, I was rather disappointed to see how his relationship developed. It was unsatisfying, and his mate Rachel is a piece of work. The writing errors are still here in full force, and the minute I saw how many times “he stated” and “she stated” were used on one page, I knew I was in for a tough time.

Jonas Wyatt is the Director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs, known for his ruthlessness and lack of civility. This disregard for social niceties has left him with a rather long track record of ex-secretaries. His Prima, the mated wife of the Feline Breed leader, is afraid that he is going down a path of destruction and orders him to give her best friend Rachel Broen the job. She knows Rachel is a tough cookie, and is the best one to whip Jonas back into shape.

Upon meeting Rachel, Jonas immediately knows that she is his mate – but she is pregnant with her ex-boyfriend’s baby. This doesn’t affect his feelings for her; he claims her baby as his own, and forms a connection to the baby in the womb. However, he can never give in to the mating heat, for fear that it will make her a target for the tons of bad people after him, or that it will take his focus off the Bureau. A few months after baby Amber is born, Amber is kidnapped by a scientist named Phillip Brandenmore who is determined to use the Breeds as research to find a way to slow aging. Jonas rescues Amber and brings her and Rachel to Sanctuary, the Feline Breed Headquarters for safety. When Rachel makes the motion to leave Sanctuary and detach herself from the Breeds, Jonas finally informs her that she is his mate, and he has absolutely no intention of letting her go.

Jonas is a run-of-the-mill alpha male: growly and “possessive” whenever someone glances at Rachel. Yawn. I feel like his character was so developed in the previous books of the series that the author assumed that we knew all about him already. I almost have to say that his alpha qualities kind of disappeared in this story, and he became simply normal.

I found Rachel to be astoundingly unlikeable; she has an irritating holier than thou attitude that makes her difficult to relate to. The utter lack of explanation of her apparently conflicted past doesn’t help either – bits and pieces are mentioned, and feel like they’re building towards something important, but we get very little in the way of her character. I thought she was a poor choice for Jonas, who has been built up in the past books, and for whom I was expecting an awesome mate. She has an utter lack of trust in him, and I was particularly annoyed by the fact that she doesn’t believe he loves her after he’s told her 100,000,000 times and she knows he’d never lie about that sort of thing.

Plot-wise, there isn’t much to recommend this book either. There were a lot of typical scenes found in a paranormal “mating” type of book. Tons of rejection on the female’s part, the male suffers suffers suffers, and, unfortunately, Jonas and Rachel’s coming together was not very interesting. It was all very…typical. The middle sagged, and fortunately the ending picked up a little, but not enough to save the book from being extremely average.

As for the writing style, the continuity errors are still there. One of the largest errors being that in one scene, Rachel doesn’t know that mating heat is real and not a myth, and then a chapter later, we’re told she knows all about the mating heat in explicit detail.

Ultimately, I felt the characters were shells of themselves, and the story was nothing special. Lion’s Heat isn’t horrible, but it isn’t memorable, either.