by Mary Anne Barker
Details on how to win a copy of Free Agent at the end of this review along with a link to purchase the book where a portion goes to support KRL.
Free Agent by J.C. Nelson is the first novel in what looks to be a new series. The characters are lively and the dialog and the action move along at a good pace. The main character is Marissa Locks. Marissa is a debt slave to Grimm, a fairy godfather, having been traded to him at 16 to get a miracle to save her younger sister’s life. She works different jobs for Grimm trying to earn enough glitter, the magical equivalent of money, to be free one day and go home to her family.
Marissa’s jobs include retrieval of stolen glass slippers, baptizing imps, and retrieving lost children from werewolves. One of her main jobs is setting up princes to marry princesses by being the ‘wrong’ woman. She makes happily ever after come true for princesses by playing the wrong woman and setting their prince up to be healed by his sweet princess from the heartbreak Marissa has doled out.
One of her jobs of being the ‘wrong’ woman doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to. This kind of set of up has worked at least a dozen times before, but this time when she is trying to set a prince up for the Princess Ari, everything goes wrong, including falling in love with him herself. But it turns out he may not be the “right” prince after all, but someone else entirely.
Things just keep going wrong for Marissa. In rescuing children from the werewolves, she finds a fae child and cannot leave him behind even though time is of the essence in a rescue. The princess Ari is disowned by her family (stepmother) and moves in with Marissa-which Marissa does not like. And someone has cursed the ‘wrong prince’ that Marissa met.
Marissa has been cursed. But in this strange world blessings and curses have the same name. There is also a new godmother in town and she wants to take over Grimm’s area.
The tension keeps ratcheting up and Marissa has a lot of choices to make. There is a satisfactory tying up to some of the lines/arcs in this book. But there are several other lines/arcs left hanging and foretelling of dark things ahead. I enjoyed this book and look forward to the next in the series.
To enter to win a copy of Free Agent, simply email KRL at krlcontests@gmail[dot]com by replacing the [dot] with a period, and with the subject line “Agent,” or comment on this article. A winner will be chosen September 20, 2014. U.S. residents only.
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Use this link to purchase Free Agent & a portion will go to KRL:
We have a winner
Lorie Ham, KRL Publisher