As you may have caught in my other reviews, I only give out 5 stars to books that are absolutely amazing...the kind that will always stay with me OR Indie writers who rock and need a little publicity. With over 4k reviews, this one doesn't fit into Indie writer who needs publicity. So that said, 4 stars would be my 5 star rating. This is not that. 
 I was torn on this one. If I could have given it 2.5 stars, I would. But since Goodreads says 2 stars = "It's Okay", that's what I picked. 
 Let me start off by saying the writing is good. It's actually really good. The metaphors sprinkled in the dialogue are often amusing and I think I only spotted one typo issue through the whole thing. Jolie is a fairly entertaining character to read. Rand isn't too bad himself. 
 However there are several "huh?" moments that just bugged me too much to give it 4 stars. 
 The whole beginning premise just doesn't fly with me. It's easy to buy in the first few chapters but the further we get in the book, the more I found myself trying to figure out how the beginning fit with the rest of it. 
 ----Begin SPOILERS----- 
 Maybe I missed something (as I often say, it's likely), but it made no sense to me how Rand stumbles on Jolie. He's doing a favor for the evil wench at the end of the book? Huh? How does this make any sense? And he finds Jolie from yellow pages? Really? Ok. Sure. But still, why are we all of a sudden in a huge war with Bella on one side? If she is so horrible that he's been working to build his own army, why in the heck did he do a favor for her in the first place...um all the way in the US instead of his home in the UK? Yeah, that's the primary thing that bugged me. 
 I was also a bit put off by the triangle with the wolf, I forget his name now because he's not a very memorable character, Trent maybe? Yes, let's call him Trent. The fight in the party where Trent punches Rand read as forced drama. As does Jolie's about-face. I didn't see much in the story to explain why he was as bad as she claims he is. He came off as a decent character...except when he'd let her get jumped. But he had a somewhat reasonable if not foolish explanation for that. 
 And then the whole Sinjin working for Bella but not working for Bella... And the half vampire, half witch who supposedly worked for Rand but then turned out she actually worked for Bella--these two clunky twists were too much for me to swallow, especially with the awkwardness of how the story began. 
 I may continue with book 2 at some point and hope it smooths out but I'm certainly not racing out to get the next one.