Urgh. Awful. I had high expectations b/c her Madness of Lord Ian McKenzie, a portrait of an autistic man, is great. This book, though? I can hardly believe it was written by the same author. And why does it have a nearly 4-star rating, when some masterpieces of this genre scarcely have higher? 
 It's not precisely the premise of the book that bothers me. I can (barely) imagine a world where shapeshifters are out of the closet and because people fear them, are "collared" with some sort of device that curbs their ability to do violence. Not a great (or very original) premise, but a lot of urban fantasy rests on somewhat absurd premises. (How about Kim Harrison's incredible Hollows series, where vampires and werewolves and pixies have come out of the closet after human society was decimated by a virus transmitted by a genetically modified tomato? Yes, that's right, her entire book concept is based on an attack of the killer tomatoes.) In the right hands, the unbelievable becomes totally believable. 
 Where my credulity is strained is when Ashley describes how the government only lets the shifters have crappy versions of every technology imaginable. They can have cell phones, but only really old, crappy cell phones. They can have TV, but not cable or TiVo. They're not allowed to rent movies that are current releases. This is never explained in terms that would make sense to any modern American. Yes, American society is all about economic inequality. But there is an ideology that underpins that inequality (e.g. the myth of the self-made man, pulling himself up by his bootstraps; the pop culture celebration of fame and grotesque wealth), which is widely held and which ensures that even the poor embrace inequality. But there's no logic to Ashley's world where the government denies shifters cable TV. I can believe the American public would (and do) embrace a lot of dubious shit, but denying people cable, even if they can pay for it? Totally un-American! 
 Not only does this idea turn the government (and society) into some ridiculous caricature of oppression (similar to her bad guys who embody every stereotype in the bad guy five-and-dime store except the twirling mustache -- no, wait, I think one of them might have that, too), it's completely unrealistic. To appreciate this point, I recommend the great book Bread and Circuses. Brantlinger describes how empires that want to subdue the masses, all the way back to the Roman Empire, do so by entertaining them, from spectacular gladiator battles for the plebes to modern television. The entertainment pacifies and numbs the mind and keeps people from contemplating inequality and plotting revolution. If you have a violent shapeshifter population that you want to keep quiet, you wouldn't deny them TiVo. You'd make sure they had all the TiVo and cable TV they wanted. 
 And if I had a dollar for every romance where we're told that the hero "had never felt this way about a woman before"... but here, this revelation comes particularly early, and thus is particularly ridiculous.