Another gorgeous, well built Fae male with bat wings to add to the collection! After seven years of silence, Callie returns home one evening to find the Bargainer waiting for her. Dealing in secrets and lies, he'll use his magic to get you anything you want... for a price. And Callie's in deep. Each bead on her bracelet is an IOU, and it's time to start paying back the debt she started accruing just before her sixteenth birthday.

My initial reaction after just finishing this books is that it's a great set up for the ongoing series, but essentially the whole book is just one long introduction. There is an overarching story arc for the series which gets set up, a great and in-depth introduction to our main characters and enough development to get you emotionally invested in their story, but while there is a plot for this book alone, it's a secondary consideration. To me, it's basically only there to introduce you to the dynamics of the relationship between Callie and the Bargainer, and feels pretty weak. There is an attempt to build some tension with Callie's worries about what she is going to be forced to do to pay off her debts, but this very quickly falls by the wayside when it quickly becomes apparent just where the Bargainer's interests really lie. 

The Bargainer does have a dark edge to his character (as you would hope for someone who initially sounds like he's some sort of supernatural mob boss), but this is quite quickly undermined. So, while he is morally grey, it's a fairly silvery shade. While this doesn't detract from his appeal, seeing him through Callie's starry-eyed gaze means my reaction to him isn't quite as strong as it would perhaps otherwise be. Plus, I'm still struggling over his title... it feels like all the good names were taken - "The Bargainer" just doesn't have quite the right menacing ring to it!

For the most part, each chapter is split between two time periods; the time where Callie accrued her debt, and the present where she's 'paying it off'. I'd recommend keeping the mantra "if he's Fae, it's OK" running through your mind throughout this read, as a lot of the former time involves a fully grown male (whose age isn't specified but, given that he's Fae, I'm assuming at least a couple of centuries!) hanging around in a teenager's dorm room at boarding school, encouraging a teen crush. When it becomes clear that she never grew out of said crush, it all just feels a leetle bit ick. Honestly, if the relationship and character development had taken place anywhere else, I probably wouldn't have batted an eyelid, but the school setting just doesn't sit quite right and even when she's an adult it does have a slight 'stockholm syndrome' feel. BUT, that aside, their relationship is compelling if predictable. 

The secondary characters do feel criminally underused - Temper, Callie's best friend, feels like she deserves some major page time to flesh her out, and Ely, while definitely an alphahole, feels like he has great potential. The fact that they only really appear as catalysts for an event is a real shame, and I hope they have more to do in the rest of the series. I also want to see more if the various characters' 'internal' beings - Callie's siren half is essentially always horny, and I can imagine this leading to some quite funny moments, especially given how she likes to flirt with the Bargainer. Likewise, Ely's alpha and Temper's witch are intriguing. 

The narrator does do a great job; her voices for each character, male and female, are nuanced and different enough that it's an enjoyable listen, and none of them are too OTT. There are some moments where she is narrating and then speaking lines for Callie that flow into one another just a bit too much; this makes it difficult in spots to tell whether what's being said is extremal dialogue or internal monologue, especially when she's having a conversation with someone else, but this is a relatively minor niggle in an otherwise very good performance.

I will come back to read the rest of the series I think, but I'm not so sold on it that it's going to immediately jump to the top of my TBR pile - I have too many other pressing reads for that! And although this was on my TBR pile anyway, the only reason I'm reading now is that it's being removed from the Audible Plus catalogue at the end of the year, so I wanted to catch it as part of my subscription before it disappeared.