Chapter 2 shifts to Rose’s point of view for a quieter, worldbuilding-heavy chapter that pays off in a satisfying way. Still annoyed at Chip for pushing back on her security decisions, Rose drives out to the county Farm Museum to see a smith she trusts, ostensibly to commission protective charms for Sadie and Addison, but really to ask him for something far more significant: a magical blade worthy of Sadie’s Guardian. The introduction of the smith, a centuries-old mountain dwarf who gave up bladesmithing long ago, adds real texture to the series’ magic system, and his reluctance to forge weapons again grounds the request in genuine stakes rather than convenience. Rose’s insistence that Chip deserves a weapon to match his growing powers reveals a begrudging respect for him that she’d never admit to his face, a nice character beat that Read more…

Book 2 of the Unlikely Guardian series picks up two years after Chip Proctor accepted his role as magical Guardian to his niece Sadie, the future Fae queen, and his nephew Addison. The opening sparring match between Chip and his sister-in-law Rose immediately reestablishes their prickly, affectionate dynamic, while making clear how far Chip has come: he’s stronger, faster, and more capable, even if Rose still beats him every single time. The chapter does excellent quiet worldbuilding as the two head to Aunt Allura’s horse farm to collect the kids. Six-year-old Sadie curtsying goodbye to the disapproving matriarch, three-year-old Addison covered in cookie flour, and the ever-present threat looming behind the domestic warmth all combine to remind readers this is a found family shaped as much by love as by duty. Chip’s continued friction with Allura, who’s never quite accepted Read more…

Chapter 4 delivers the book’s central reveal, and it earns every bit of the buildup. A splinter in Sadie’s hand sends a phantom sting through Chip’s own palm, the first hint that something is already binding him to his niece in ways he can’t explain. Minutes later, summoned into the family study to meet a diminutive Gnome attorney and face his sister-in-law’s icy Aunt Allura, Chip learns his late brother and Lili chose him for a role he never agreed to and doesn’t remember accepting. The scene that follows is one of the most satisfying reveals a series opener can deliver: Rose admits she placed a glamour on Chip years earlier to hide the magical world from him, and lifting it floods his mind with buried memories of werewolves and magic from a night he’d long since written off as Read more…

Chapter 3 shifts back to Rose’s perspective and does heavy lifting for the book’s worldbuilding, introducing Warren, a gruff werewolf private investigator Rose quietly hires to look into whether her sister’s death was truly an accident. Their conversation reveals the shape of the hidden world underpinning the whole series: a Fae royal family in exile, a rare and dangerous line of succession, and a very real fear that Lili and Bobby’s deaths were a deliberate strike meant to disrupt it. The chapter’s best material, though, comes from Rose’s fraught relationship with her formidable Aunt Allura. Allura’s icy, public rebuke of Rose for chasing an artifact instead of protecting her sister lands with real emotional force, and it’s the first clear signal of the political pressure Rose is under to do everything by the book from here forward, whether she agrees Read more…

Chapter 2 shifts entirely to Chip Proctor’s point of view, and it does excellent work establishing him as more than the jet-setting hedge fund playboy he first appears to be. Arriving at his late brother’s home after the funeral with his supermodel girlfriend Mia in tow, Chip’s carefully guarded composure cracks the moment he senses his grieving four-year-old niece, Sadie, needs him. Their scene together, a knight-and-princess routine to coax her into eating lunch, is warm, funny, and genuinely moving. Underneath the tenderness, though, the chapter builds real tension. Chip’s unexplained irritation at Rose caring for the children, a feeling he can’t quite justify to himself, hints at something deeper than ordinary in-law friction. His well-meaning but tone-deaf comment about Rose’s delayed arrival sparks a sharp, honest exchange between them that neither one backs down from, laying bare the grief Read more…

Book 1 of the Unlikely Guardian series opens with a jolt of pure action. Rose, a Fae relic hunter and royal arms mistress, battles a millennia-old demon guardian inside a hidden temple in Iraq to recover the Star of Azothine, a cursed sapphire artifact her family has hunted for years. The fight is fast, brutal, and beautifully choreographed, and it establishes Rose immediately as a formidable warrior comfortable operating far outside the human world most readers know. The chapter’s real gut-punch lands the moment Rose emerges victorious. A phone call from her Aunt Allura delivers devastating news: Rose’s older sister Lili and her human husband Bobby have died in a car accident, leaving behind two young children, four-year-old Sadie and infant Addison. The abrupt tonal shift, from triumphant demon-slaying to grief and dawning suspicion, is exactly the kind of emotional Read more…