Audiobook Review: Shield's Lady by Jayne Ann Krentz

Shield's Lady
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz
Narrator: Natalie Ross
Series: Lost Colony Trilogy (Book 3)
Publication: Brilliance Audio (September 8, 2009)
Length: 11 hours and 57 minutes

Description: Legends can be dangerous, just ask Sariana Dayne. She sets out to hire one and wakes up married to him. It’s a marriage of infuriating inconvenience as far as Sariana is concerned.

Gryph Chassyn stirs all her senses but he’s one of the mysterious mercenaries known as Shields. Sensible women do not marry such men. But for Gryph, marrying Sariana is a matter of honor, passion and survival. He needs her in ways she cannot even imagine.

Before Sariana can find a way to escape the bond that has been forged between them, she and Gryph are caught up in a desperate quest to save their world. The future looks a little different but some things, like love and passion, and murder never change.

My Thoughts: This science fiction romance written in 1989 was an entertaining story with Krentz's strong, independent characters. Sariana Dayne has fled her home to the flamboyant West when she was chosen for an elite academic academy. She is sure that if she can right the finances of the Avylyn clan of jewelers, her reapplication will be successful.

Unfortunately, in order to right their fortunes, she needs to recover a prisma cutter which has been stolen. To do so, she wants to hire a Shield named Gryph Chassyn who doesn't seem interested in the job. Her plans to drug him and kidnap him so that she can make her business proposal doesn't work out the way she would like.

Gryph has come to the city to look for a bride. He isn't interested in a job, but he becomes very interested in Sariana. He believes that she has the qualities that make a good Shield's mate and that she would be able to give him a son. She isn't interested and, in fact, isn't at all sure she believes any of the legends she's heard about Shields since she arrived in the West. She wouldn't mind having an affair with him though.

He tricks her into marriage with him during their night of passion. And when his informer is killed after telling him the cutter was taken by a rogue Shield, Gryph and Sariana embark on a journey to find the missing cutter and the rogue Shield.

They also discover that the rogue has found an intact prisma ship filled with weapons and being insane is determined to use the weapons in his quest to conquer the planet. Gryph and Sariana have to find a way to work together to defeat the rogue which they manage and to chart a whole new path for Gryph's social class under the guidance of Sariana who uses her knowledge gained in her education in the East to assist. 

This is science fiction lite. It takes place on another planet which was settled some unnamed period of time earlier. The two ships sent to settle were separated when attacked by unknown enemies. One ship was assisted by the Shields who were part of an earlier migration. The Shields managed to carve out a role for themselves and their descendants in the rigid social structure that came along with the colonists. The book's main strengths come in the interesting characters especially Gryph and Sariana and the romance they have. 

It was a fun story. 

I bought this one. You can buy your copy here.