A review by whimsicallymeghan
Deceptions by Kelley Armstrong

3.5

Olivia has been diving deeper and deeper into finding out who she is and who her birth parents are. After being hunt down and almost murdered, she’s still a target to the Cainsville elders, her ex-fiancé and now the Huntsman. But when things go explicitly wrong with her ex-fiancé, James, she finds herself with more visions but no answers. This leads her down a quest to continue learning the truth about her parents and the town. This was the third book in this series and it’s by far the weakest book yet. It was still a really well written, fast-paced, entertaining story, but the twists and turns we went on felt so unnecessary. The whole arc with Olivia, Gabriel and Ricky has gotten to the point where we’re in a love triangle and the reader wants out. We spent the majority of this novel talking and thinking about the feelings between them all, especially between Olivia and Gabriel. The reader was happy seeing them as just friends and now we’re going down this road just feels boring. It’s supposed to shake things up, but it really feels like it’s weighing things down. The fae folklore plots were better and the reader enjoyed learning more, especially when it came to learning more about Olivia’s parents. We learn of new motives as to the why they did the things they did and with the visions we were able to see more of them as characters and it’s been such an enjoyable journey. It really enriched this world more and gave the reader something to look forward to in the next book. The characters are definitely developing over the course of the novel; although the insistent psychobabble of character emotions and motives got to be a bit much in this one. Usually, the reader is really into seeing characters in Armstrong’s novels understand and rationalize their feelings, but this one just didn’t do it for the reader. It also felt like two men were always saving the woman and at times she couldn’t even speak for herself and it just felt icky. There is still a lot to stay for and there is still potential for the following novels to be less displeasing, so the reader will solider on, but this one was not the reader’s favourite; looking forward to what comes next in this series.