Tall, Dark & Furious

Pyte/Sentinel #6

by R.L. Mathewson

From bestselling author R.L. Mathewson comes the sixth installment of the Pyte/Sentinel Series…

For readers who enjoy paranormal romance with a twist.

For three centuries, Trace waited for this moment, imagined all the things that he would do to the Pack that tried to kill him, and now that he was free…

All he could think about was the woman that he’d claimed as his own. She was everything that he’d always wanted and once he had his revenge, he would make her his.

Sam had resigned herself to a lot of things over the years, being the town joke, blacking out at inopportune moments, and living with a dog that hated her, but what she hadn’t planned on was suddenly finding five large men destroying her basement, looking for a tomb that she never knew existed. In one moment, her life changed forever, leaving her to wonder how she was going to make it out of this alive.

Genres: Paranormal, Romance, Paranormal Romance, Vampires, Fantasy, Shapeshifters, Audiobook

ebook

First published December 26, 2019

About the author

New York Times Bestselling author, R.L. Mathewson was born in Massachusetts. She’s known for her humor, quick wit and ability to write relatable characters. She currently has several paranormal and contemporary romance series published including the Neighbor from Hell series.

Growing up, R.L. Mathewson was a painfully shy bookworm. After high school she attended college, worked as a bellhop, fast food cook, and a museum worker until she decided to take an EMT course. Working as an EMT helped her get over her shyness as well as left her with some fond memories and some rather disturbing ones that from time to time show up in one of her books.

Today, R.L. Mathewson is the single mother of two children that keep her on her toes. She has a bit of a romance novel addiction as well as a major hot chocolate addiction and on a perfect day, she combines the two.

In 2019/2020, R.L. Mathewson will be publishing Devastated, the first Anger Management novel, Tall, Dark & Furious, the 6th installment to the Pyte/Sentinel series, Irresistible, the long anticipated novel for the Neighbor from Hell Series as well as many more books throughout the year, paranormals, contemporaries, and YAs.

Reviews

[Amsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edited

Ignore the previous review as it was written on June 2016.

Started listening to it. one hour in I like it.

[Ꮗ€♫◗☿ ❤️ ilikebooksbest.com ❤️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a good one!



The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙💚❤️💜
Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌏🌍🌎
Character development: 😉☺️😟😤🥰
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Solo Narration

The Hero: Trace - in 1665, Trace’s vampire father Ethan found out he was a Pyte, and not human. A Pyte is a result of the mating between a vampire and a human. They fled the village and the sentinal’s were after them. They moved from village to village until finally moving to the colonies. They ended up in a village where he met a shifter girl named Mary whom he thought of as a friend, while he waited until his transformation at 16 years old. After a fight with his father, Trace ran to make sure Mary was safe, but she betrayed him.

The heroine: Sam - she lives 10 miles from town with the nearest neighbor eight miles away. She lives with her dog Charlie, who seems to enjoy making her life a living hell. She broke up with her fiancée two months ago when she caught him with the grocery store checkout clerk, and he announced she was terrible in bed. Sam has a habit of fainting at the worst possible moments and between that and the episode with her fiancée, she was the town joke. She was also scared of her own basement and had been since she was a child, living with her grandmother when she got locked down there for 10 hours.

The Story: Sam works as a nurse in the emergency department at the hospital and many times seen people she trained move up over her. The doctor in charge wouldn’t promote her because he was afraid she would pass out during a trauma, even though it never happened. It only happened when she was embarrassed or anxious. One day when Sam goes down to her basement to change a fuse, she sees six armed men down there tearing her cellar apart.

Trace had been buried in the wall of that basement for hundreds of years. The men that buried him there came back to check to see if he was still there and he was able to kill them. That is when he smelled the human female. He still wanted to get revenge on the girl that betrayed him. I liked his first meeting with Sam. She thought he was some kind of monster when he came out of that wall. Of course, she passed out, which was kind of cute.

This was the most confusing book I have ever read or listened to. The beginning was good, but then it kept changing every chapter to another location and different characters and I really had no idea what was going on for quite a while. I didn’t like it. Some of them were sentinels from the prior books, some were Trace’s father and others. I got it all after a while, but it was confusing at first and at times throughout. Overall though the story was really good. I loved the storyline with the two main characters and Trace’s fathers storyline as well.

This audiobook was told in multiple points of view via solo narration. It was narrated by Celestine Wolf. I am not usually too fond of solo narration, though Celestine does a good job. She has a nice voice and is good at doing different voices for different characters.

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[Syeda Noureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

it has been three years since we are waiting for the pyte/sentinel series !!!!
I think the author should quit Neighbour from Hell series and do this one instead.
it is far more brilliant and interesting than that cheesy series.

2020
now it's been a lot of years..and still nothing but one book!!

[Raine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Things are getting interesting in this world!!!

I like this book, but all the different storylines sometimes is a little confusing. Though, I really like how all the characters got together and all the different and complicated relationships. That Williams mansion in New York is certainly getting crowded!

I want to say that maybe the next books are going to be about Jill or maybe even Ethan, Trace's father, but I'd been wrong before. Not that I'm disappointed because I love how the overall storyline is unfolding. I just hope Ms. Mathewson can push out these books quickly since I love her writing and hate waiting so long between books.

[Louise H's Book Thoughts · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, even though it turned out NOT to be Kyle's story this time. (Though I'm really hoping good things really do come to those who wait). There are a few things that stopped it being a fantastic read, but not enough to bother me greatly.

I liked the basic plot idea and how the author had thought of getting around the issues of Trace being an inexperienced virgin. He did seem a little too mature for a man who'd had zero social interactions since the age of 16, but there was no other way for the story to work so - *shrugs*.

There was lots of different sub-plots within the main plot, which was great and made for one action packed and fast paced read. But, and this is really where that star was lost, all that extra stuff was at the expense of the relationship between Trace and Samantha being developed. It felt rushed and I needed to see more of them just being together forming that connection. I felt that I was "told" as often as I was "shown".

Samantha and Trace were still wonderful characters, I adored them both. Whilst both of them are nicely developed, Samantha did sometimes feel like an amalgam of previous heroines. However with the huge cast of characters that is being built it is reasonable to expect some of them to be similar personalities.

It was great to get a tiny glimpse of two important characters that we haven't seen for a while. Along with some of the new ones introduced in this book there are at least another 5 characters, to my mind, who need their own stories. So all I can add is "Get writing RL Mathewson!"

[Kimberly K · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I really love this author and this series. So you may ask why I’m only rating three stars? Well, this book was four years in the making. I’d forgotten so much. Yes. I could have gone back and re read the others, but that’s not my style and shouldn’t be required in a book focusing on different characters. But this one held little reminder of who characters were or past plot points as old characters were brought in. Just a little line reminder would have been hugely helpful. But not only that, I found it often hard to follow. The jumping around, a common style for RL, was just a bit much this time around. My head swam in confusion at points. And I often felt disconnected because of it.

That said: the new characters were great. I loved Trace’s commitment to his “wife”. There were laugh out loud funny parts at time.

Overall, it was very much an RL book. I just needed more to connect after a four year gap.

[Evie ⌲ · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf at 70%

[Jacqueline J · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay I read the rest of the series so that I could read this one. This is a series that has to be read in order. So I bought this one, realized I needed to read the rest of the series to understand who all the people in this series were. I finally got to this one.

So I was really interested in the main couple but there wasn't very much of their story. There was a lot of story from many of the previous character and lots of new characters who were poorly presented. There was too much sex. The sex scenes this author writes are just too long. Honestly I skip/skim most of them. As a kicker there were sex scenes between couples from previous books. One of them right in the middle of two sex scenes of the main couple. I had to check twice to see who was doing who. So much more story could have been told.

And then there was the "humor". I'm using quotes because I don't find it at all amusing or even plausible much less interesting to read about people taking seriously a woman who is so scared of spiders that everyone in the house has to come save her and then after a 12 year old boy flushes it she insists that the door to the bathroom be closed and locked. The food thing that this author also uses as humor in all her books gets old too. There's also a lot more of all the men just luv all the cute women than I can really get behind.

Then there were elements of the writing style that bothered me. First of all kudos to the author for using 3rd person POV. But there were A LOT of sentences that started with or included "the man that, the woman that" What's wrong with using that person's name? Also a big pet peeve of mine is authors who use that when they should be using who. See what I did in that sentence? It's who for people and that for objects. For pets I'll accept either. The man who not the man that. The chair that not the chair who.

So if the story had focused more on the main couple, had explored the hero's angst more and the process of him falling in love with the heroine and learning to function in the modern world I would have been on board with that. As it was the hero and the heroine didn't save themselves and/or each other. The heroes from the previous books came and did it in the muddled mess that was the climax.

[B.E.Love · Rating 5 out of 5]

**re-read**I loved this book, but I have loved every book from this series. Didn't want to put it down and it was great reading about the old characters while meeting new ones at the same time. I so hope we don't have to wait long for the next book, after finishing this one I wanted to jump right in to the next book. And it's Kales book!!!!!! I can't wait. This is a series I will read again, I can't seem to get enough of not only this series but this book.

[Marian · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 stars rating

Although this is one of my fav series in general, Pytes are awesome, can't get enough of them, the wait for this book has been too long; even though I enjoyed the main thread regarding Trace and Sam, it was constantly interrupted by too many different threads about characters from earlier books, and I couldn't remember almost anything that had happened to them, I'd have to have an eidetic memory for that (and unfortunately I don't), so it was hard to follow who was who, and what the hell was going on...

I loved Trace, his story is heartbreaking, and I'd have read more about him and Sam. The rest of the characters are interesting too, but they were so many that it just made me more confused.

Like all the books in this series, the writing is fairly humorous, the world described is fascinating.

Please, Ms Mathewson, don't make us wait 4 years for the next Pyte book.

[Miss Tammy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too many pov's

[Heather andrews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trace just needs to control his woman at times, "...Trace decided that he’d let this go on long enough. Walking over to his wife, he shoved the Sentinel out of his way, grabbed his wife, and threw her over his shoulder with a sigh when she yelled, “A really big stick." I liked this book, but there was just too much going on with all the different characters, I think the book should have just focused on Trace and Sam because I got confused at times.

[Cassidy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last book came out a long time ago. I got a little lost with some of the extra storylines. The feeling that you should remember, but don’t quite. If you have the chance to reread, do. I still enjoyed it. There is just something about an R.L. Mathewson book.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Samantha and Trace are the main protagonists of this book. However we are also introduced to several new characters, and we catch up with past characters as well. I enjoyed parts of the books. Unfortunately a lot of it is becoming very repetitive. Obsessions with junk food. Growling. Growling. And more growling. There were also a handful of extra sub plots it was hard to keep up! So many people would be talking and I genuinely couldn’t keep up.
I do want to finish the series for continuity, but I’m just sad that it’s all become so convoluted and repetitive.

[Krystle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was hard to get through. I had forgotten about half the characters and some of the story was hard to follow like there were missing chunks. This use to be my favorite series, but this one was probably the weakest one. There were story threads brought up but felt more like a throw away point. Like the Danni stuff which was brought up but didn’t really move the story in any way. I couldn’t figure out if Jill saw Joshua or not and why was he there? He didn’t speak and tossed in a thought about Jill doing stuff to protect the family which was reiterated later on by Jill herself. I’m sure these points are things to be covered in the future books, but all the jumping around took away from Samantha and Trace’s story. I almost feel like this could have been a filler book for all the characters already introduced if there were things that needed to be set up because, although they are cute, Samantha and Trace didnt actually bring anything new to the story so far. The next book in the series is about 8% done so I doubt it’ll be out in the next year and a half so I might be hanging up this series which is too bad because I really did love it. I’m really interested in what would happen with Joshua and Marc, but maybe I’ll check back in 10 years.

[Temporaryspell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did like it because I enjoy her books and this world, I want to know what happens next.
I think however the multiple pov's and the writing style and starting to get to me.
The way characters are described sometimes : "the woman that...", "the annoying b****** who..." are getting repetitive and confusing.

[Catgirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a really hard time getting into this book. I enjoyed the main couple, Trace and Samantha, but I couldn't place any of the other characters, and since there wasn't any reference to previous books/stories, it was really difficult to follow.

[Pria · Rating 2 out of 5]

So many sub stories that made it so unbearable. So confusing.

[Cheri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too many side stories going on that had nothing to do with this story. not enough Character building, of the new Characters, I had a hard time staying with the book. disappointing.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first, I was very, very confused. I couldn't keep track of the characters and everything that was happening. It was like every chapter kept on jumping from one situation of a set of characters to the next situation of the another set of characters. And then it all suddenly made sense. All the previous chapters were set up so it would create a new situation that would bring everyone together. Yes, it was very confusing at first. For me, it was like jumping from one story to the next and then back to the first story. But, eh. At least it made sense eventually.

Trace and Samantha. Don't know how I feel about them. They're an eh for me. Like... ok. They're a couple. Got nothing against them or even either them as separate characters, so ok. I still don't know when Samantha exactly fell in love with Trace though. Like was it gradual? Did she just start feeling comfortable with him at first? Again, they're just easy to accept because they're ok.

Samantha and Nathan. Brother and sister. Their relationship is probably the one I like the most in this book. I don't even know why. It probably has something to do with Nathan being this trained Sentinel, but Samantha has no problem yelling at him.

[Marishka · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would definitely recommend re-reading the series before starting this book. It’s been three years since the last book was released. I don’t re-read series. Just not how I roll 🤷‍♀️ so when I say that I mean it. I was confused a lot . So many characters that I had no clue who they were. Wish she would have given us a little info when they were thrown in the storyline but she didn’t. Or at least a character list on who they were in the beginning of the book. Add in to the confusion with past characters there was also jumping around with different characters between the chapters. Almost to much as it took away from the main couple. I still enjoyed it. But this is one of those rare occurrences that as I read nothing came back to me about the past books. If I hadn’t been so confused this would have been higher rated.

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the book... Though the actual story of Trace and Sam was very small but sweet and funny...
SUGGESTION:
Reread previous books of this series...

Reading a book of this series after 2 years was very confusing all the characters were messed up in my head.... Half of the time I didn't understand what was going on.... And there were 3 or more sub stories running parallely.. To say I couldn't keep up would be understatement... I was getting hard core whiplash....

Whatever happened to the girl with broken hip or something who was also pregnant she was kyle's friends and idk who was her mate!!????

I'll have to read it all again
It was sooooo nice to read a book from this series after soooooooooooooo long.

[Dar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Considering I didn’t know the characters going into this story, I quickly became extremely invested in their happiness! Samantha and Trace haven’t had easy lives, hers we can relate to, his is the stuff of nightmares. Unbeknownst to them, they have been adjacent to each other for years, and once they meet, they are inseparable. A few twists that I didn’t see coming, some moments that brought the tears, and a few that had me gasping in disbelief. This took me on an up and down journey, with lots of old friends, some new ones, and some stories that need to be told ASAP!

[Cassie Ashford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well H - E - Double hockey sticks! RL!! Woman! You have done it again! I was so hooked on this book that in the blink of an eye the book was at the end. Gasp!!!!

You are a tease! A horrible, horrible tease! You give is just enough that you leave us frothing at the mouth. Who freaking knew that we needed Trace’s story? Not me! But now I need Jill’s, Kale’s, Ethan’s, Joshua’s...aaaaahhh and Danni!!! I need more!

Sigh...I shall patiently impatiently wait.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book; would be better if I was caught up on the series

I very much enjoyed the Trace \ Samantha storyline but have to admit being a bit lost during some of the rest. I have the way back history from books 1 and 2 but not 4 and 5 . So while I did enjoy the read, I would have loved it if I had read them all. Don't let that stop you if you are looking for a good Pyte read.

[Esra · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been a while since I read a book from this series . So , I forgot some characters and it was very confusing to read side stories , other events that happening. But once I remember the series of events and lose ends of other books I really enjoyed this book. And can’t wait for whats next !! Please Ms mathewson don’t wait for long 🥺

[Laurie Tell · Rating 2 out of 5]

No idea what was going on

I had read the previous books in this series years ago, but it has been a while. I was beyond confused. Who were all these people? I had no real idea what was going on.

And he was a monster who scared her to death. Then suddenly she was in love. Wth?

I was really disappointed...

[Nikki James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth the wait

Absolutely loved this book
Catching up with my favourite Pytes, Sentinels and shifters was like coming home and R.L didn't fail to deliver with Trace and Samantha a couple you're rooting for from the start, so of course this means I'll be going back for a re-read of the whole series
So yes well worth the wait

[Megan Simpson · Rating 5 out of 5]

RLM BOOKS NEVER DISAPPOINT

There hasn't been a book I have read of Mathewson yet that I haven't rated 5 stars... And I won't be starting with this one either. Bravo! Loved this long awaited book in the pyte series! Can't wait for kales book!

[Lacie Romano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gah! This book was so good and flowed so well! I do recommend a re-read of the Pyte series before starting but even though I didn’t, it was still so good! This author is able to pull on the heartstrings while making one laugh out loud! I’m so glad to have this book!