REVIEW: Burn for Me by Ilona Andrews

Summary: Nevada Baylor is faced with the most challenging case of her detective career—a suicide mission to bring in a suspect in a volatile situation. Nevada isn’t sure she has the chops. Her quarry is a Prime, the highest rank of magic user, who can set anyone and anything on fire. Then she’s kidnapped by Connor “Mad” Rogan—a darkly tempting billionaire with equally devastating powers. Torn between wanting to run and wanting to surrender to their overwhelming attraction, Nevada must join forces with Rogan to stay alive. Rogan’s after the same target, so he needs Nevada. But she’s getting under his skin, making him care about someone other than himself for a change. And, as Rogan has learned, love can be as perilous as death, especially in the magic world.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Overall: Rich with magic, action and the beginnings of a romance, Burn for Me is right up there with Andrews’s Kate Daniels series. I loved Nevada and Rogan together. The concept of the Houses marrying for the sole purpose of gaining more power is fascinating and kind of mob-like. And the magic rankings and the origin of magic…awesome.

Thoughts: Nevada is a less psychotic version of Kate and is dedicated to her family and their PI business. I liked her. She did what needed to be done, but didn’t go overboard and knows her way around a gun. Her magic as a human lie detector was interesting and so was her reason for keeping it a secret. It never says what her magic would rank as, but there are a few instances that insinuate that she’s pretty powerful.

“Because you are Primes and the rest of us are, apparently, nothing.” 

“Mhm,” he said. “The irony of this is so rich, it’s simply delicious.” 

“I don’t see what’s so ironic about it.” 

“I’d tell you, but it would ruin the fun.”

Nevada is forced to take on a case by her parent company, Montgomery International Investigations, who expect her to fail. The case is to find and turn in Adam Pierce, a pyrokinetic Prime wanted for murder, to House Pierce before the police find and arrest/kill him. In the beginning of her investigation, she manages to meet up with Adam in an effort to convince to turn himself in because she knows the only way to survive the case is for Adam to go willingly. From that moment on, Adam fixates on her and because he’s a psychopath, he tries to kill Nevada’s mechanic grandmother in an effort to free her from what he believes to be a metaphorical cell.

Then we have Conner “Mad” Rogan. Mad Rogan is first introduced in the prologue when his disowned cousin asks him to find her son, who was involved with Adam when he killed a man and blew up a bank. He agrees to help. The next time we see him, he’s kidnapping Nevada directly after her first confrontation with Adam Pierce. He proceeds to chain her in his basement in the middle of a magic circle with the purpose of forcing information out of her about Adam. It basically turns into a torture session. But Nevada manages to keep her mouth shut about the pyrokinetic Prime by instead revealing her darkest secret about her deceased father and his illness.

Mad Rogan reminds me A LOT of Curran Lennart from Ilona’s Kate Daniels’ series, especially when he made his own version of Curran’s “please and thank you” speech to Nevada. He expects to get what he wants and doesn’t care who or what he has to go through to get it. It’s made clear that this is the general attitude of Primes and their Houses. Only Rogan is like ten times more scary.

In the course of their investigation (they end up working together), they discover that Adam is just a pawn in a bigger scheme to destroy Houston and damage the multiple Houses that reside there. I don’t want to go into it too much detail, but the lore behind everything is interesting. And India’s Shiva seems to be popular with the Andrews duo.

As a whole, Burn for Me was a fantastic read. I flew through it in about two days. I 100% recommend.