Alphas Challenge by Lauren Dane

Have you ever been really excited to read a series so you start your book right away, get halfway through, then realize it's not the first book to the series? I have! Actually, I do it all the damn time and this series is no exception. But I have to say I'm not all that broken up about it because this particular series is like a bunch of stand-alone books that kind of fit into eachother but have their own story-lines. I'm finding that I really like it! I've read books like this before but not out of order like this so I didn't realize how much easier it makes it to kind of read these stories at your own pace instead of one after the other. Kudos to Lauren Dane for choosing this approach for this series. It certainly made it easy for me to jump right in with Alphas Challenge.
As I first started reading Alphas Challenge I had an idea of what to expect but in all reality it's not what I got so I must say this is a pleasant surprise for me because I was expecting just your run of the mill, slightly interesting but sort of sloppy C rate paranormal romance. Which, in all honesty I get a hankering to read sometimes. I would not however, rate this book a C by any means. There were parts of this book that caught my interest for sure.One, the Tri-Bond ritual. Now...basically what the essence of the Tri-Bond is summed up to is that when a wolf finds their life-mate they have to create a Tri-Bond with another male wolf so that if something happens to the life-bonded male his female counterpart can draw on the strength of the Tri-Bonded male to survive. Show of hands, how many think this is sexiest??? That's a shame. I think it's just plain sexy. Not having just one, but two strong sexy hunks to draw strength from? Sign me up please! Two? The strength of the life-bond is just...wow. Like you meet a guy and ten minutes later you have to do the do?I'm unsure of how I felt about this. But hey it made for interesting reading material. Three? The actual storyline of this book was so good. Evil brother, evil drug, lots of evil that had to be taken care of. I fully enjoyed it.
There were some downsides to the book. It was too short, and I looked at some of the other books in the series...they just get shorter. This is disappointing to me because I feel like these books can be better developed and easier to fully understand if they were longer. Not only that but the charaters were hard to relate to. And I was hoping to see more of the male charater that Cade and Grace Tri-Bonded with.
I will however be reading more of the Cascadia Wolves series.
Rate: 3.5 Stars