Christine Feehan – Viper Game

Book 11 in the GhostWalker series, published January 27, 2015.
Genre: paranormal romance/romantic suspense
Cover: My book has the smaller cover, which I prefer, as there are no real snakes in this book at all.



GhostWalker Wyatt Fontaine knows the price he paid for the secret military experiment that gave him his special catlike abilities. After all, he left his bayou home a healer and came back a killer. While Wyatt and his GhostWalker brother Gator may have known exactly the sort of game they were going into, Wyatt never anticipated where it would lead – or to whom.
The swamps held many mysteries, but few are as sinuously seductive as Le Poivre. The woman the locals call Pepper is every bit as enigmatic as the three little girls she’s desperately trying to protect. From what, Wyatt is soon to discover. Right now Pepper needs a man like Wyatt. Passionately. But her secrets are about to take them both deeper into the bayou than either imagined – where desire is the deadliest poison of all.


It’s been almost three years since I read the last GhostWalker book, but I was back into the storyline in just a few sentences. Welcome to a world where a sociopathic evil genius scientist changed soldiers into supersoldiers, not only enhancing their latent psychic powers (what they signed up for), but also crossing their DNA with animal DNA. And other scary things …
So if you think, o another genetic altered soldier story, you are right. But Christine Feehan’s first book in this series was published in 2003, so keep in mind that this was (one of) the first series with this topic. And in my opinion, one of the best. Especially the earlier books.

When Wyatt’s grandmother calls him to come home, as there are some strange things happening in the bayou, he brings some of his friends with him. They have been ambushed recently and they are all recovering from their wounds. But if his grandmother needs him home, he will be there as soon as possible.
So when he finds out that some security guard to a factory building in the swamp has harassed his grandmother while she was harvesting the herbs and plants for her medicine, he has to teach that guard a lesson in manners. Because no one harms his grandmother! She took him and his brothers in when their parents died, and raised them. They were not rich, and it was hard work to keep them all fed and clothed and educated, but she did it with love.

When Wyatt finds out that the building was once owned by Whitney, he is immediately suspicious. Especially when he meets a woman who has escaped the place with a little girl in tow. She is like him, a GhostWalker, even though she denies it. She is just a reject, a failed experiment, while he is a true soldier. Because Whitney did not just experiment with mature soldiers, whom sort of consented to it, he also experimented on little girls he bought from orphanages, or just made an orphan. They had no choice, no say in whatever happened to him. And he also paired them together, biochemically. Something that has made for some great couples lately. But Wyatt’s counterpart is poisonous, literally. She was created to seduce and kill, but she refused to do it, even though she was in heat constantly, and that earned her a place on the list to be eliminated. Along with three littly baby girls, who are literally vipers.
So when Wyatt finally gives in to the knowledge that Pepper is created just for him, that he can cool her fire, he is determined to keep her for himself. And to rescue the other two little girls that were left behind in that place. But first, he will need more of his friends to turn his grandmothers’ home into a fortress…


I do love this series, but Wyatt is certainly very highhanded. He doesn’t give Pepper much of a choice to figure out living on her own, when she has lived in captivity most of her life. Also, the heroines in this series are often much more kick ass, for me Pepper was a bit too docile. Wyatt kept her under his thumb most of the book, and she did not show much spirit. I like equal couples a lot better. Yes, she did fight and kill when necessary to protect her loved ones, but she did not enjoy doing it.
Also the plot is not getting much further either, Dr Whitney only plays a part in the end of the book, and I would really like the teams to close in on him, or for him to make a move on one of the babies he so desperately wants.
There was a lot of talking and sex scenes and too little action for me. But I am very much intrigued by Wyatt’s team members, one of whom can literally walk through walls, and who encountered a woman who was made into a Black Widow spider. That relationship sure looks promising as this man is totally not capable to casually interact with other people but also brilliant and extremely rich.

So, while I did enjoy this story, I did not love it, but I do want to read the next book.

6 stars.

© 2015 Reviews by Aurian