Audiobook Review: Covet (Crave #3)

Author: Tracy Wolff

Narrators: Heather Costa & Tim Paige

Audiobook Length: 21 hours 39 minutes

I may have reached my breaking point. As if trying to graduate from a school for supernaturals isn’t stressful enough, my relationship status has gone from complicated to a straight-up dumpster fire. Oh, and the Bloodletter has decided to drop a bomb of epic proportions on us all… Then again, when has anything at Katmere Academy not been intense?

And the hits just keep coming. Jaxon’s turned colder than an Alaskan winter. The Circle is splintered over my upcoming coronation. As if things couldn’t get worse, now there’s an arrest warrant for Hudson’s and my supposed crimes—which apparently means a lifetime prison sentence with a deadly unbreakable curse.

Choices will have to be made…and I fear not everyone will survive.

Find It On: Goodreads / Amazon (Novel) / Amazon (Box Set 1-4)

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Covet is the third novel in the Crave series. This installment shows me why I have heard from others that the series is dividing. There is a lot of the first novel that is undone in this one with a new direction in this one. For me, I almost read it as book one is a standalone and book two just features a new story with characters that happen to share the names. It’s not the best way to describe the set-up, but this was as close as I could create. Aside from the romance angle, the main story focuses on trying to find the crown that King Cyrus, the vampire king, has been searching for while escaping dangers.

The romance was very difficult to connect with in the story as Grace flip-flops a lot. I understand that the author most likely intends for Grace to have loved one of the suitors all along and is meant to be with them, but it does not come across this way. Instead, it seems that Grace is purely driven by the mating bond, which came across that a random third suitor could have been bonded to her and she would love him and completely disregard her feelings for Hudson and Jaxon.  When the triangle was introduced, I was not in favor of one or the other, but some readers who were will be disappointed in one way or another. For me, it all was very forced where the reader is almost explicitly told who they should want with Grace and who should be cast aside. For me, this was a huge miss, but I am hopeful that this choice is final and maybe the series can move on to other focuses.

The pacing of this novel is all over the place as the characters go from event to event yet there are paragraphs spent on descriptions and inner monologues. There are a lot of repetitions where a word or phrase can appear almost ten times within a few minutes. For being a very long story, there is only enough actual material for about half of it when you take out all the fluff. Within this story alone there were a lot of contradictions as some details stated one thing and then a short time later this was negated by other details. When you add that with inconsistencies from the other novels, I am not quite sure the author tracked her story correctly. By the end, though, I think the author has found her way and seems to have a clearer direction for her plot and characters, which is one of the few reasons that I will continue as this story alone was not a great read for me.