Stephanie Tyler - Dire Needs

Feared by humans and envied by werewolves, the Dire Wolves are immortal shifters, obeying no laws but their own bestial natures.
Rifter leads the pack, and his primal instincts have led him to claim Gwen, a woman seeking solace from the chronic pain that has wracked her body her entire life.
But whatever future Rifter and Gwen have is threatened by an enemy of both humanity and the Dire Wolves...

Comment: Last year, when I noticed this author had a series with shape shifter characters, I decided I needed to get it, because shape shifters are the paranormal subject I prefer the most in my paranormal romances. Like it happens with most books, however, I couldn't read right away and so it's been waiting until the very end of last month, when I finally picked it up.

This is the story of a group of shape shifters, a little different from the usual because they have stronger abilities and control than the average were, as they call the other shape shifters. 
Rifter is the sort of leader of the Dires, this better group of shape shifters, and his goal is to find peace for them fro the witches and to help the closest pack of weres to have stability. All the elements of the Dires have a special ability, Rifter's is to dream walk. Anyway, they are in trouble because it's difficult to keep the peace, to fight and to help when they're so few, only six.
Gwen is a young woman, a doctor, and she has a terminal disease. She is invited to leave her work and she just wants to live her last days to the fullest, but somehow she sees herself in Dire problems after she helps the future were leader. Then she meets Rifter, who helps her and the action starts developing from there.

Well, I'll start to say I was disappointed in this book. I was ready to be amazed bu a fascinating shape shifter story, full of myths and an interesting society but the author has chosen to highlight the differences and th fights. It's all well if one lies this sort of tone but it's not for me. I wanted romance, I wanted a structured society and a developed storyline like we see in Nalini Singh's or Patricia Briggs's stories. Not that I anted this to be a copy of those, but I wanted to see some kind of natural explanations and a world where I wanted to live as much as read about. Unfortunately, this didn't happen.

The world wasn't interesting for me. The issues and some of the things included were, but not the world itself, I didn't care for it and it was a bit tiresome to read because I felt the story wasn't set on a strong base, everything felt so random and mixed together. I also felt the author would jump from subject to subject, dumping lots of information but not really telling a story to grab the reader, just wanted to let it all simply be there. It wasn't very thrilling to read.

The characters had their points of interest but I think they weren't well exploited. And I don't mean only the two main ones, I mean all of them. The fact is, I thought none of them were good enough to know despite some more pertinent qualities or mystery about them. For instance, their behavior didn't seem so bad, but then their actions would be just the usual, nothing different or fresh, and even what we could see as traditional for shape shifters wasn't done in the most interesting way. I was really sorry to see such a potentially good plot and world go to waste in the middle of all the randomness. Too tiring to keep track of useless and not interesting things.
The romance or Gwen's issues about her heritage weren't well done either I think. Not enough flavor in either thing and most of the time I just wanted to get the reading done.

I'm pretty certain I won't keep going with this. One of the characters seemed promising but I really don't want to go through the story to know what would happen to him, so I'll just let it rest here. I can understand how this looks promising but for me, it failed to deliver and the moment I finished it I was relieved, not sorry.