Breaking Badger by Shelly Laurenston

 

It’s instinct that drives Finn Malone to rescue a bunch of hard battling honey badgers. The Siberian tiger shifter just can’t bear to see his fellow shifters harmed. But no way can Finn have a houseful of honey badgers when he also has two brothers with no patience. Things just go from bad to worse when the badgers rudely ejected from his home turn out to be the only ones who can help him solve a family tragedy. He’s just not sure he can even get back into the badgers’ good graces. Since badgers lack graces of any kind…

Mads knows her teammates aren’t about to forgive the cats that were so rude to them, but moody Finn isn’t so bad. And he’s cute! The badger part of her understands Finn’s burning need to avenge his father’s death—after all, vengeance is her favorite pastime. So Mads set about helping Finn settle his family’s score, which has its perks, since she gets to avoid her own family drama. Besides, fighting side by side with Finn is her kind of fun—especially when she can get in a hot and heavy snuggle with her very own growling, eye-rolling, and utterly irresistible kitty-cat…

 

Breaking Badger (The Honey Badger Chronicles, book four) by Shelly Laurenston

Start date: September 20, 2021

End date: September 26, 2021

Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 stars

Trigger warning: graphic violence

I have been patiently awaiting the release of this book ever since I saw the teaser for it. I was a little nervous to see how Laurenston would continue the series considering the youngest MacKilligan sister is the 17-year-old Natalie Malone. Imagine my happiness when I realized the book followed one of Max MacKilligan’s basketball teammates instead. While waiting for this book to come out, I read the rest of the Pride series, so I was ready for those characters to make appearances in this book (which they did!).

The story switches between the points of view of Finn Malone (Natalie Malone’s half-brother) and Mads Galendotter. The romance between them happens about three-quarters of the way through because the focus of the story is solving the murder of Finn’s father. When the story finishes, we’re closer to finding out who killed him, but we haven’t solved the case, which opens the door for subsequent books (perhaps involving the remaining three Malone brothers?).

The book opens with a hilarious scene showing how Max, Mads, Streep, Tock, and Nelle met and became a basketball team. Mads and Max are coincidentally sitting next to each other on the school bus when Mads’s cousins, Tilda and Gella, decide to pick on her by picking on Max. This serves as foreshadowing for later events while also establishing Max’s personality. Max unleashes her lunchbox full of scorpions on the twins in retaliation, and Streep, Tock, and Nelle join her in eating the scorpions before getting kicked off the bus. Mads is only focused on basketball tryouts and how she’s going to make it to school in time now that the bus isn’t an option. Charlie, Max’s half-sister, finds the group on the side of the road and reams Max. Max thinks quickly and claims the group are her friends, and to prove that they are, she says they’re all going to try out for the basketball team after school. The rest of the girls agree for varying reasons, and the rest is history.

In present day, Mads and the rest are a professional basketball team as well as a gang of highly skilled thieves and assassins (#justgirlythings). While on a job, the team run into the Malone brothers, and both groups are shot at by an all-human crew. The Malone brothers shift into their tiger forms and help Mads and her teammates take out the men. The Malones get off the island but when it’s obvious that the getaway crew has abandoned Mads et al, they go back for them. Everyone gets off the island okay, but Max feels betrayed by her coworkers who left in the getaway helicopter. She decides to thank the Malones the next morning by showing up to their house unannounced with Danishes, which goes over about as well as you’d think considering how much felines like strangers—let alone a group of strange honey badgers—on their property in this universe. Max being Max holds a grudge against them for kicking her and her teammates out when all she was trying to do was thank them. As it turns out, the honey badgers are the key to solving the murder of the Malone brothers’ father.

            Finn is a professional football player in the shifter league as are his brothers Keane and Shay. They spend most of their free time tracking down leads in their father’s murder, so when they’re told that the key to cracking the case is talking with the honey badgers, they balk. These tiger shifter men are almost too proud to apologize for insulting one irrational honey badger shifter woman. Finn is elected to be the one to smooth the waters, and he chooses to bridge the gap by talking to Mads, whom he took a liking to after finding her sleeping in his kitchen cabinet after her teammates had been kicked out. She’ll help the Malones if that doesn’t interfere with basketball.

            Mads has one thing on her mind: championships. She may be the only one focused on the goal, but her teammates know how seriously she takes basketball, so they’d never let her down in her pursuit. Affecting her in ways she won’t show her teammates is the fact she recently discovered her great-grandmother Solveig died.

When the four messengers only gazed at her, Mads blinked and asked, “Wait. Wait. She’s dead? Solveig Galendotter is dead?”

“I’m sorry, but yes.”

“In battle?”

“No.”

“Store robbery?”

“Um—”

“Did the cops shoot her? The Marines? Another blood feud? The old man down the street who said he’d see her dead one day? That militia? They were really gunning for her.”

“Ummm. No. She’d already taken care of the militia. The old man died in his sleep months ago. She’d come to a reasonable agreement with the cops and the Marines. And she was managing the blood feuds.”

“Then what?”

“It seemed she just died. In her store. Heart attack, apparently.” (Laurenston 90)

            Mads’s great-grandmother is from her Viking, hyena shifter side of the family. Solveig is the woman who stepped up to raise Mads when Mads’s mother refused. She didn’t allow Mads’s father custody—Mads has a gnarly scar from when her mother cut her to prove to Mads’s father she’d rather kill Mads than allow him custody—but she didn’t want to raise Mads because she was half honey badger shifter either. Solveig took a hard stance on raising Mads Viking first and foremost but then learned everything she could about honey badgers at the library to make up for her deficit in knowledge. As only a Viking would, she throws Mads into a pit of scorpions to test one of the things she learned about honey badgers.

That’s when, according to Solveig, “I knew you’d be just fine.”

Although Mads always retorted, “You threw me in with a bunch of scorpions? Are you insane? What is wrong with this family?”

“Why are you yelling? You lived.” (Laurenston 293)

            Now that Solveig has passed away, Mads’s mother and grandmother have reentered Mads’s life…to accuse her of stealing Solveig’s sword, a cheap replica sword that should have rightly passed to Mads on Solveig’s death anyway. Mads doesn’t have the sword, but her family doesn’t believe her and threaten war if the sword isn’t returned. Mads wants nothing to do with her family (they do as well), but the sword business has them stirring up trouble for her. A group of her cousins ambush her after her date with Finn, which has Finn questioning Mads. She doesn’t want to involve her teammates because she knows they’ll go scorched earth on her family, and she doesn’t want that; she makes Finn swear not to tell them anything. Mads finds the sword in her newly purchased house and knows the only person who could have stolen the sword was her father. My only thing is I wish we had gotten to meet Mads’s father to give context to her relationship with him and why he would steal it for her. At the end of the novel, Mads and Finn’s lion teammates visit her mother and grandmother to warn them off from messing with Mads. Her teammates end up trudging through a hoarder’s house to steal Solveig’s ashes for Mads in the ensuing battle.

Mads has just bought a house in Charlie’s neighborhood, which is the first permanent home she’s ever had, spending most of her life breaking into houses to sleep in strangers’ cabinets. Despite this, she has multiple storage units scattered around port cities for easy getaways containing money and priceless artifacts. (It’s revealed that all her teammates have stored less-than-legitimate artifacts in her storage units unbeknownst to her.) She uses the money and a painting to buy the house from a pair of bears.

The boar gestured to the house. “Would you like to see inside?”

“Nah,” Mads replied, turning to walk back to Charlie’s house.

“Love to,” Charlie said, grabbing Mads’s shoulder and steering her toward the front porch. “You should look inside the house,” she whispered. “What if they have no cabinets?”

Mads froze mid-step. “By Odin’s beard!” she cried, startling the bears. “Who would have no cabinets?” (Laurenston 122)

Following Mads’s team’s win, she and Finn are forced on a date by Mads’s teammates. The characters in these novels are always playing matchmaker for each other, and I think that’s rather sweet. Now that Mads’s mind isn’t on basketball, she can focus on the cute tiger in front of her. Finn is easygoing, and he thinks Mads is attractive, so he agrees to their date. Their romance heats up despite Mads’s injuries following the attack by her family members. I appreciated that this novel, unlike other paranormal romance books I’ve read lately, had a story outside of the romance of the two characters. There were quite a few: Mads’s basketball games, the Malone brothers’ pursuit of justice, recruiting Charlie for the football team, the Galendotter sword, and Natalie’s criminal activity. It kept me entertained and left room for more books to come.

            I hope there’s another book planned in the Honey Badger Chronicles series because there are a few unanswered questions I want the answer to. The most obvious of which is what happened to the patriarch of the Malone family since that was left open at the end. Other questions I want answered: why are the Malones called the Black Malones despite being Mongolian, will Stevie and Shen have a baby, what’s going to happen when Natalie starts living parttime with the MacKilligans?

 

Sources:

Laurenston, Shelly. Breaking Badger. Kensington Books, 2021.