Selene - Lilith Saintcrow This review also posted at A Bookish Compulsion

**This prequel offshoot to the Danny Valentine series following two of the side characters, Selene and Nikolai, was released as a serial on Ms. Saintcrow’s website in 2008; the website has since been rebooted and this content has yet to make a re-appearance.**

Selene was an edgy ride right from the beginning. Even knowing the end result thanks to reading the Valentine series it still managed to be a thrill that rode the border between excitement and fear right till the very end. The characters in this book were flawed and damaged—none of them particularly likable but all thoroughly relatable, even in the instances when I wanted to slap some sense into them. Selene spent most of the page-count fighting against being the damsel-in-distress no matter how apt the description and Nikolai took alpha to the extreme; bypassing feelings for safety and not really giving a damn about the consequences. The largest problem I had with this story is one shared with most of Ms. Saintcrow’s work: the ending. Saying it was a cliffhanger is a bit of an understatement; it felt more like ending things at intermission, so much was left in loose ends the only conciliation I could find was in the fact that a gosh-o-mighty number of years later they are both content and able to help Danny out, so things must have gotten resolved…eventually.

I enjoyed this story and am happy to give it four shiny stars.