Into the Mist by Maya Banks

Eli is shifter who has spent most of his life hiding the fact that he's different. While on a hostage recovery mission he and his team are exposed to a chemical agent that alters the group members' DNA and allows them to shift also. Eli is still different from the rest of the group, but those differences are now much less obvious.

Tyana is a mercenary whose only family is the her brother Damiano and the rest of the Falcon Mercenary Group. Damiano was the guide on Eli's mission and now he too is a shifter. The problem is that he can't control his new abilities and with each passing day Tyana is more worried that she'll lose her brother forever. In order to help him she goes after the people who exposed him to the chemical agent and then left him for dead---Eli and his men. Her plan to use Eli to get information and then extract revenge goes badly wrong when she's unable to control her attraction to him.


I've read many books about shape shifters of various sorts so I know that the key is to just play along. Still, I had a hard time with Eil's ability to shift into mist or smoke. I just couldn't stop thinking about conservation of mass and the fact that a full grown man would make a huge cloud. How could people not see a cloud that big? That was a minor quibble, but I did have two problems with the book that were more of an issue.

The first problem with the way Eli and Tyana were portrayed. At the beginning of the book Eli came off like a jerk and a bit of a man ho. The shift from that to devoted lover seemed too abrupt and didn't work for me. For her part Tyana spends a large part of the book behaving in ways that are pretty irrational. I understood why, but that didn't make it any less frustrating to watch someone who is supposed to be a tough professional make mistakes that a total amateur would avoid.

The other problem was with the writing, which was rather repetitive. I lost track of the number of times that we were told that Damiano couldn't control his shifts or that Tyana would do anything for him or that the other members of the Falcon group would do anything to protect Tyana or that Eli's men couldn't control their shifts either. The rule in good fiction is "show, don't tell" and I felt that Ms Banks did too much telling in order to explain or excuse actions that would otherwise have seemed foolish.

In the end the book wasn't terrible, but it wasn't all that enjoyable for me either.

Grade: C+