ARC Review: Storm Echo by Nalini Singh

Storm Echo
Author: Nalini Singh
Series: Psy-Changeling Trinity (Book 6)
Publication: Berkley (July 26, 2022)

Description: New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh takes us into the hearts of two fractured people in a world on the brink of a psychic Armageddon . . .

Silence has fallen. The Psy are free to feel emotion. Free to love. But Silence was never a prison for Ivan Mercant. The biggest threat to his future lies dormant in his brain—a psychic monster that wants only to feed. And now, the brutal leash he’s kept on that monster is slipping. He prepared for this day, for the end of Ivan Mercant . . . but that was before he met Lei.

As primal as she is human, this wild changeling brings color into his life, laughter to his soul. Then the dream shatters in a rain of blood, in silent bodies in the snow. Lei is gone. Vanished without a trace . . . until he meets strangely familiar eyes across a busy San Francisco street.

Soleil Bijoux Garcia is a healer who has lost everything. She exists in a world of desolate aloneness . . . till the day she finds herself face-to-face with a lethal stranger. The animal who is her other half knows this man, but her memories are tattered fragments. Sorrow and a need for vengeance are all that drive her. Her mission? To kill the alpha of the DarkRiver leopard pack.

But fate has other plans. Soon, a deadly soldier who believes himself a monster and a broken healer might be all that stand between life and death for the entire Psy race. . . .

My Thoughts: This is the sixth book in the Psy-Changeling Trinity series. While it is a romance, it also moves the larger story arc begun in the first Psy-Changeling book along. 

The romance features Psy Ivan Mercant and Changeling Soleil Bijoux Garcia. Both are deeply troubled people. Ivan was exposed to drugs while he was in his drug-addicted mother's womb which changed his brain structure. He had a difficult childhood until his mother died and he was found by the powerful Mercant family. The Mercants are spies but they also have a strong, close family structure despite the rules of Silence which should have governed them. Lei also had a difficult childhood. She's a healer who was raised by her loving parents, both loners, who lived outside their clan. They died in a car accident when Lei was about eight. At that time, she was taken to her grandfather's clan but was never accepted by him or by his son when he became the alpha. 

Ivan and Lei meet in Texas when Ivan is at a wolf training course and Lei is contemplating leaving the clan that doesn't accept her. They are fascinated with each other, but before their relationship can go anywhere, there is a rupture in the Psynet which causes the Psy who live adjacent to Lei's pack to go on a murderous rampage killing most of Lei's pack. Lei herself is almost dead when Ivan finds her. He loses track of her when she is sent from one hospital to another in the aftermath of the rupture.

Lei has lost her memory of ever meeting Ivan. She is living only for revenge when Ivan encounters her again in San Francisco. Lei is determined to kill Lucas Hunter who is the alpha of DarkRiver. She believes that he killed the few survivors of her former pack. She doesn't remember Ivan but her cat does and chooses him as her mate. Only Ivan believes that his will shortly go crazy because of his pre-birth brain damage and, while he wants Lei, he doesn't want to take her with him when he goes insane.

I enjoyed Ivan and Lei's hard-won romance. I also liked having some of the questions that have been left unanswered in earlier books finally answered. Of course, there are still many unanswered questions remaining about this unknown enemy's determination to bring down the PsyNet and kill countless Psy.

Fans of the series will enjoy this episode. Ivan and Lei are both characters who are badly in need of a happy ending.

I received this one in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley. You can buy your copy here.