Review: Gray Bishop by Kelly Meade (Cornerstone Run #2)

Gray Bishop (Cornerstone Run #2)
Kelly Meade
Published: Oct. 21, 2014 (Intermix)
Purchase: Amazon
Review source: copy provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review

Reviewed by: Margaret

Rating (out of 5): 4 stars

Note: While review will be spoiler free, it does make reference to previous books in the series.

The McQueen brothers, Bishop, Knight and Rook (I love their names!) are the sons of the loup-garou alpha in Cornerstone Run. Bishop has been preparing his entire life to become the next alpha, working twice as hard to prove himself because he is a common gray wolf, while nearly all alphas are the elite black wolves. He’s starting to doubt his ability to protect his run since both of his brothers were recently kidnapped by a group of vampire-loup hybrids. The hybrids, escaped experiments created by the Magi council, are trying to destroy the loups one settlement at a time and force the middle brother Knight, a rare white wolf, to help them create more hybrids.

Jillian Reynolds was sent to Cornerstone to help the McQueens battle the hybrids. She’s the next in line to lead a neighboring run. (Her father is the current alpha and her future husband will be the next one.) She was set to take over the run once before, but lost her husband and child in a car accident. She and Bishop are immediately drawn to each other, but know they can never be together because of their responsibilities to their families.

Gray Bishop feels a little bit more like a traditional romance than the previous book in the series, Black Rook. The characters are more mature, more experienced and are more upfront about their feelings. Plus their attraction was already established in the previous book, so there’s not as much set up required. In this world, the loup don’t have predestined mates like a lot of shifter romances. Instead, Bishop and Jillian talk about their beasts choosing a mate and the human taking much longer to fall in love, or even having to reject that decision entirely. (Or the reverse is possible as well.) I really like that aspect of Kelly Meade’s mythos, but I felt like there was a little too much talk about the beasts in this one.

Even though I enjoyed it, I didn’t really get what I wanted out of Gray Bishop. I expected to learn more about the mages and the vampires, the other supernatural creatures that live in their world, but there’ s nothing new here in terms of world building. I hoped to uncover more of the conspiracy that created the hybrids who continued their attacks on the loups, but they really only play defense, reacting to the attacks but not investigating further. What does play out is a lot of internal politics as the Cornerstone loups try to integrate refugees from the hybrid attacks and deal with issues of succession. Meade really puts her characters through the emotional ringer in this one and the connection to the characters was what kept me turning the page.

A large part of the book is also devoted to Knight as he struggles with the trauma from the events of Black Rook. As a white wolf, an empath, he also has to deal with the emotions of everyone around him, including his family as they find out the truth about what happened to him. He still has a long way to go in his own book, the final one in the trilogy, before he’s recovered. I also hope that White Knight returns to the mystery plot that began in Black Rook and wraps up all of those loose ends.

Sexual content: sex