Rating: 3 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | All Romance
Length: Novel
Colton Butler and his father have relocated after Colton was discovered with their previous Alpha’s son in a compromising position. They are settling into a new wolf pack when Colton realizes he has found his mate, Parker Montgomery. Unfortunately two big restrictions prevent Colton from claiming Parker as his own. The first is that Parker is a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday and, as such, cannot be mated before then. The second is that unfortunately Parker is human. Pack law forbids a wolf from mating with a human as the mating bite needed would turn the human into a were and change their lives forever. But deep inside Colton is an alpha that must have his mate and who is willing to flout any pack rules to make it so. However the question still remains, will Parker accept Colton and his wolf? Or will their blossoming love be cut off and die before it has time to grow?
Rob Colton’s Timber Pack Chronicles was a good, solid mystery that too often got weighed down by what seemed like a never-ending amount of sex. Unfortunately, the story was a piecemeal attempt surrounded by the sexual encounters of the two main characters, Colton and Parker. While I could appreciate the idea that these two were young, randy high-school age males and therefore quick and frequent bouts of sex would be common and even expected, I still felt the overall story suffered from too much of a good thing and not enough story to anchor it all. This was really my chief complaint with what was, in my opinion, a decent plot and good execution in developing the basis for what is apparently going to be an ongoing series. I felt author Rob Colton did a great job establishing a large cast of secondary characters and giving us snippets of background on many, which really laid the ground work for this series to take off and continue.
In fact, had the copious amount of sex scenes been reigned in, I can assure you this novel would be boasting a much high star value. The mystery surrounding the “rogue wolf” whose attacks were both vicious and seemingly random was effectively done. I was left in the dark till the very end about the identity of the attacker and felt the discovery of who he was very neatly tied up a dangling plot point. Also, each attack was fraught with tension and left me rather shaken over how close Parker came to nearly losing his life each time. But again and again, we were yanked from the story by another lengthy sex scene that seemed to punctuate every time the plot had a developmental moment. To be frank, after a while I found myself just wanting them to end so I could get back to the actually story itself. At that point, it became clear to me that this was a series of hot sexy scenes tied together by a story that was forced to limp along in their wake. I sincerely felt that had the author edited those scenes back a bit the novel would have been reversed and the result would have been a solid mystery story with hot wolf sex thrown in to accentuate and help detail Colton and Parker’s growing relationship.
However, what worked well in this novel was the interrelationships between the characters and the establishing of the timber wolf pack itself. The lives of these teens were, in fact, very interesting and the way they grew closer and stronger as the novel progressed was very entertaining. I was delighted to get the sense that these were actual teens on the cusp of manhood rather than some poor attempt to write younger characters that were far too mature to be believable. On the contrary, I felt the author captured the mindset of eighteen-year-old boys quite well and kept them vulnerable throughout the story, thereby lending them even more credence and keeping the story real.
All in all, Timber Pack Chronicleswas a good start to a promising series. I am hopeful that the next installment will focus more on the story and be less driven by incidental love scenes that all too often muddy up a good plot.
