Review: Suleikha Snyder’s PRETTY LITTLE LION.

Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own.

📖 Q: Halloween this or that! Chocolate candy or fruity candy; Doing the “Thriller” dance or watching someone else do it; funny costume or scary?

This book doesn’t mess around.

If you like your PNR dark & grim with characters who wrestle with their own morality, white supremacy, & the weight of their pasts, with loads of steam & scenes that will fog up your ereader & a core of redemption glittering throughout, you might like Suleikha Snyder’s upcoming release Pretty Little Lion, second in her Third Shift series.

This series is bold & ferocious, two of the biggest reasons why I like it so much.

Pretty Little Lion features Meghna Saxena-Saunders, a beautiful supernatural working undercover who often has sex with her deplorable targets and/or kills them in order to ultimately save lives & do some good in the world & Elijah Richter, a former military lion shifter who’s now head of Third Shift, a black ops group, & is attempting to infiltrate the same group Meghna is.

The book opens with them propositioning each other, each thinking of the other as a “Target.”

Skewering white privilege, racism, & misogyny & offering deadly leads who are POC & all too aware of what they provide “a country that didn’t even want her [them]” Pretty Little Lion isn’t afraid to interrogate, question, critique, or annihilate.

I love it. This is all enhanced by the lushness & heat of the many physical scenes & the final moment when *both* leads are willing to confess their love—which is very hard-won.

But there’s a storyline here that doesn’t add much to the actual story for me & that takes up a lot of space & in general things feel like they could have been pared down some (thanks to @literaryillusions for helping me by sharing her own thoughts regarding this aspect of the plot!).

Overall, this is a compelling series that kinda grabs a reader by the throat.

4 ⭐️. Release date: 10/26.


[ID: an ebook is on top of an open hardback placed on top of a bright yellow coat. A copy of the first book in the series—Big Bad Wolf—is on top of the coat as well & above the ebook of Pretty Little Lion.]