"The Cyborg didn't scare her."
That line kept bouncing around my head while I sat in the pediatrician's waiting room with Sophie, who had decided that this particular Tuesday was a good day to spike a fever and refuse all forms of comfort except being held like a koala. So there I was, one earbud in, bouncing a whimpering toddler, listening to a cyborg monster hunter prowl through a spaceport while his future love interest basically shrugged at death. Honestly? Relatable energy.
A Cyborg Romance That Doesn't Quite Know What Speed It's Going
Okay, so Wild Blood. Naomi Lucas writes sci-fi romance with alien-adjacent heroes, and Dommik is basically a cybernetic predator who hunts monsters across the galaxy. Katalina is a woman so haunted by death that she volunteers to be his assistant, which is the sci-fi equivalent of answering a Craigslist ad that screams "do not answer this ad." The premise is fun - dark, a little unhinged, and the kind of thing I'd normally devour during nap time.
But here's the thing. At 5 hours and 50 minutes, this should be a quick, punchy listen. And it IS short enough to knock out in a week easily. The problem is that the story feels like it's both rushing and dragging at the same time? Like, the world-building for this cyborg-shifter universe gets tossed at you in chunks without much context, and then there are stretches where Katalina is just... thinking about how dangerous Dommik is. Again. We know, girl. He's a scary cyborg. You're into it. Let's move.
I've heard Lucas's Naga series is stronger, and I believe it. This feels like early work - the bones of something interesting are there, but the characters stay pretty surface-level. That surface-level feeling is exactly what separates okay sci-fi romance from something like Black and Blue, where the leads actually had me rooting for them by the halfway point. Dommik growls a lot. Katalina is drawn to danger. Their chemistry exists but never really caught fire for me the way I wanted it to. I kept waiting for that one scene, you know? The moment where you pause the audiobook and just sit with it for a second. It didn't come.
The Narrator Speed Situation Is... A Whole Thing
So this has dual narration - Alexander Cendese does Dommik's chapters, Hollie Jackson does Katalina's. In theory, great. I love when romance audiobooks split the POVs between narrators. In practice? You basically need to be your own sound engineer.
Hollie Jackson narrates FAST. Like, noticeably fast. I normally listen at 1.25x because that's my sweet spot, but her chapters? I had to drop to 1.0x, and honestly could've gone slower. It felt like she was speed-reading through a book report she'd forgotten was due. Which is a shame because her emotional delivery is actually solid when you can keep up.
Then you flip to Alexander Cendese, and suddenly Dommik sounds like he should be running a speakeasy in 1920s Chicago. That deep, kind of old-timey gangster cadence is... a choice for a cyborg monster hunter in space. His natural voice is genuinely nice - rich, low - but when he voices Katalina, she comes across whiny and much younger than she reads on the page. It pulled me out of the story more than once.
So the practical reality: you're toggling your playback speed between narrators. Hollie at 0.9-1.0x, Cendese at 1.0-1.25x. Not ideal when you're also trying to, say, keep a toddler from licking the waiting room floor.
Who's Going to Love This (And Who Should Swipe Past)
If you're already a Naomi Lucas fan and want to explore her back catalog, or if sci-fi romance with monster-adjacent heroes is your comfort zone - you'll probably enjoy this fine. It's short, it's spicy (content warnings for violence and sexual content, heads up), and the premise is genuinely cool.
But if you need a book that survives constant interruptions? This one's trickier than it should be, mostly because of the narrator speed juggling. I paused it probably 30 times across three days and kept losing the thread - not because the plot is complex, but because the pacing is uneven enough that coming back cold left me going "wait, where are we?"
Not groundbreaking, but sometimes you don't need groundbreaking. Sometimes you need a cyborg romance in a pediatrician's waiting room. Alchemist and an Amaretto scratched a similar itch for me - fun premise, easy to pick back up mid-chaos, and the audio actually held up across a dozen interrupted sessions. I just wish the audio production matched the fun of the concept.
The Mom Math on This One
Short enough to finish in a week? Yes, easily. Satisfying ending? It's fine - not ugly-cry territory, not fist-pump territory. Somewhere in the pleasant middle. But the narrator situation genuinely knocked this down a peg for me. I shouldn't need to work this hard to listen to a 6-hour romance. My car time is sacred, and this book made me fiddle with my phone settings more than I'd like.
If you've got a library subscription, stream it. Don't spend a credit.
