Foxfire by Margaret Carter and was essentially the story I bought the anthology for. I loved the idea of a paranormal story featuring a kitsune, because well, you just don’t see it done very often, if at all in romances. So I snatched up this anthology.

After getting yelled at by her sister, Tabby takes refuge by walking on one of the trails that run by her house only to run into Kenji and after staring at each other for a bit Kenji ducks behind a tree and starts dancing with himself while Tabby collapses on the trail and does the same thing. The story redeemed itself a bit by explaining why they both had the sudden urge to masturbate in the middle of the woods, but it still felt like the scene was just thrown in there. Aside from that this was a pretty sturdy story.

I was probably most impressed with how Carter was able to weave great backgrounds for Tabby and Kenji and keep it interesting in such a small amount of a page space. The writing was good enough that I would’ve been interested to read a full story involving the two characters and to have seen a more elaborate plot line brought in. In fact, I was a little sad to see this story end so quickly. I’ll be looking into some of Carter’s other books.

Survivor was the worst story in the anthology for me. David is a pilot in a squad that sounds a lot like the Blue Angels, except it’s called Screaming Dragons. He’s been having wet dreams of this dragon chick in another dimension for years and after crashing while doing some training he finds himself actually in that dimension and he can now transform into a dragon.

I found myself skimming after reading 50 pages of this story, because I’ve seen this plot done before and world David was thrown into didn’t interest me. Neither really did the characters. The part that I got the most into was in the very beginning and had to do with David’s flight team. They were interesting characters and there were also aspects of David’s personality being explored in that small space of time, but those seemed to be dropped after he ended up in dragon land. The writing itself wasn’t bad; I just couldn’t get into the plot or characters.

Taking Shape was the middle ground story in all of this for me. Nick is a shape shifter, but in the sense that he can change into anything. He’s kind of like Mystique off of X-men… well, except he’s not blue and can change into animals and inanimate objects as well humans. Anyway, Nick and the rest of his family who can also shape shift run a private investigator business. The most recent of cases that Nick takes on is to find out if a woman is embezzling money from the company she works for. Tally is, of course, innocent and Nick ends up getting attached to her which presents several problems seeing as he’s been hanging around her bedroom in several different forms without her knowing who or what he really is.

This was just a fun story. Nick takes a bunch of different shapes from Tally’s dull boyfriend to a rubber ducky shaped vibrator in order to spy on her. It’s funny in parts and while the mystery is a no brainer, it’s still great to watch the story unfold and to see the different situations Nick gets himself into. I’ll be checking out more by this author. ( )