Review: The Mighty Hunter

Review: The Mighty Hunter (Lord of the Abyss 1) by Michelle M. Pillow.

Simple enough erotic novella - Bridget Dutton is a female scientist on a research ship that gets attacked by a sea monster known as a Scylla. She is rescued by hunky merman warrior Caderyn who was out hunting the monster. Bridget and the other female crew member are taken to Atlas, capital city of an undersea empire known as Ataran - yup it's Atlantis. How... original.

Bridget cannot return to the landworld as the merfolk cannot break the surface at all and cannot breathe air. She must stay under the protection of Caderyn until she chooses a husband - and king Lucius has taken a shine to her, but of course her heart... and body belong to the hunky Caderyn.

Towards the end of the book there is a tiny bit of action - where Bridget, now a mermaid, gets kidnapped by the Olympians, a group of evil amazonian like mermaids who keep male sex slaves and like nothing more than massacring humans. She escapes, meets up with Caderyn who was on his way to rescue her and gets taken to his country estate (under water) and they live happily ever after.

As you can tell from my synopsis, plot isn't this book's strong point. It's fairly unoriginal, though to be fair it hums along merrily enough and does nothing badly. The two major selling points are sex and mer content.

There's plenty of sex in such a short volume, and although it's not very varied, its pretty damn hot. It's taken the very easy option of all in human form, a little disappointing when we have fishtails and arm fins galore.

Lots and lots of proper mer content. Caderyn is a merman with a tail which manifests when he is outside the dome of the city. All humans get tails & gills if they survive the descent into this underwater world - That simplifies things nicely. I also like the fact that almost the whole book is set underwater and these merfolk cannot surface. The evil, demon eyed mermaids with their sex slaves and hedonistic ways are brilliant, I love the fact that these can surface, and our noble Atlanteans don't know why.

The romance element isn't badly handled either. It happens quickly, but I thought that it was reasonably convincing and Bridget did give token resistance and question everything like any sane person would.

The Mighty Hunter is a nice, light read. It's a decent enough erotic romance with a good level of mer content, plenty of sex and a hunky merman hero. It's not the best in it's field, but certainly not the worst. It is also only the first volume of a trilogy, and I'm quite looking forward to the other two volumes. I hope the evil mermaids show up - they were cool!

6/10