Kirkus
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The alpha of a leopard pack is enthralled with his mysterious pregnant neighbor. Remi Denier was abandoned by his father and raised by a single mother who died when he was a teenager. After restless years of race car driving and loneliness, Remi accepted his dominant nature and created RainFire, a pack located deep in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. He was joined by others interested in the challenge of building a pack from scratch. While scouting nearby land the pack was hoping to annex, Remi discovers heavily pregnant Auden Scott in a newly constructed cabin. Auden is a Psy, a race of humans with psychic abilities. Auden has a peculiar specialty: When touching objects, she can “read” the thoughts and feelings of anyone who has previously touched those items. Pregnancy has amplified her skill, and the machine-made cabin has been designed to give respite from the flood of feedback that overwhelms her Psy senses. Something about her scent disturbs Remi, but as an alpha, he also feels a deep-seated urge to protect Auden and her unborn child. Auden eventually confides the truth in Remi: Her powerful Psy parents experimented on her brain when she was a teenager, and her pregnancy seems to be reviving old symptoms. She experiences long blocks of missing time and is afraid her personality may have split in two. Even more frightening, she’s sure her doctors have sinister plans for her baby. The romance between Remi and Auden is an afterthought; Singh’s novel is focused on the continuation of a multibook arc describing the challenges facing the Psy as they race to save the millions of minds connected to their failing neural net. In previous books in this long-running series, Singh kept the romance arc at the center, but this installment feels noticeably off balance. A compelling but lopsided read. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.