Dark Minds by Michelle Diener

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Romance, Space Opera
Content: Strong Language, Sexual Situations, A sex scene that happens mostly off page.

 
Imogen Peters knows she's a pawn. She's been abducted from Earth, held prisoner, and abducted again. So when she gets a chance at freedom, she takes it...

Captain Camlar Kalor expected to meet an Earth woman on his current mission. Instead, he and Imogen are thrown together as prisoners in the hold of a Class 5 battleship. When he works out she's not the woman who sparked his mission, but another abductee, Cam realizes his investigation just got a lot more complicated...

Imogen's out of her depth in this crazy mind game playing out all around her. But she's good at mind games. She's been playing them since she was abducted. Guess they should have left her minding her own business back on Earth…

This last book in the Class 5 companion series was on par with the others. Imogen and Cam where both likable characters, and we get to revisit the couples from the other two books. I liked seeing all three women interact and bond with each other, but honestly I didn't feel like there was much difference in the characters or story lines of any of these books. The most distinct characters where in the first book Dark Horse. Sazo and Rose are still the best characters in the whole trilogy. I just feel like maybe the author lost some originality after that and went on repeat a bit.

Here are some examples of how much alike these books are:

-The kidnapped women are all from earth. This in itself is not a bad thing, but they are
not very distinguishable from one another to me. There were little differences in them, but not enough.

-They each end up developing a special bond with one of the A.I.s from a Class 5 ship, and this in turn sets into motion actions that are very similar in each story.

-The love interests in each of the books are also all of the same race. Each of these women fall in love with one of the Grih, a race that is very elf-like in appearance. I think it would have been more interesting if they had each fallen in love with someone from a different alien race.

-There is also this whole thing about one of the alien races holding music - singing in particular - as almost sacred in this trilogy, because few of them can actually sing themselves. That aspect came into play yet again in this book. When I finished the second book I thought it would be great if one of these earth women would end up being completely tone deaf and maybe they would cringe when they heard her try to sing, haha. Needless to say that didn't happen. What a lost opportunity, although the musical performance at the end of the book was nice. I often found the choice of songs they sang to be somewhat amusing and odd.

All in all this series was a mildly enjoyable, but mediocre read. If you like space romance and are looking for something light to fill the time between heavier reads then by all means give this series a try. It's not bad, it just skims the surface of being good.