Title: Mission: Guardian Angel (Veslor Mates #2)
Author: Laurann Dohner
Genre: Paranormal, Sci-fi, Romance
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t get why Drak is such a popular alien name, but it is, and we just have to accept that Drak is always going to be a hot as hell alien lover.

This Drak is part of the Veslor grouping on Defcon Red. Veslors are kickass elite warriors who don’t take names but allow local deities to sort the fallen bad guys’ bodies out. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of them–but the treatment they receive is beyond terrible, and their human Spec-Ops Team Lead is a prejudice douche. Let me summarize: life on Defcon Red sucks for them even though they make life better for everyone and work four times as hard as the human teams.

Enter Abby (let’s not forget that Laurann Dohner can’t help but name her heroine’s names that end with A-I-E-O-U or Y) after surviving the Gorison Traveler Incident she is a Veslor champion. She caught wind that the Defcon Red Veslors are treated poorly, and she manipulated everyone and everything to get on that ship to investigate, and she won’t go anywhere until those warriors are treated like the prized warriors they are.

This book is classic Laurann Dohner doing her best. There is storytelling here and sexy, spicy, heat. I was happy with the depiction of the world she created–but it’s still exhausting to relive her tired tropes–toxic masculinity: the betraying alpha male who puts on one face to everyone else but is evil only to her. The casual threat of sexual assault by a pack of human males where the heroine needs to be saved by the manimal who is more humane than the actual human is featured. The strong woman who has been burned by classless, dishonorable men in the past–and only a male unable to wander once mated can be the answer to this conundrum of evil men. So over these repetitive themes.

But what I loved most was that there was a lot of depth to the Veslor grouping, and we got to see them together. I’m in love with Maith. I can’t wait until he gets his own book.

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