Shadow Game

GhostWalkers, Book 1

By: Christine Feehan

Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte

Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

A man and woman possessed of telekinetic powers. She is the doctor. He is the experiment. What comes between them is a terrifying secret history that could save them or destroy them.

©2003 Christine Feehan (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"In Feehan's latest paranormal, sizzling sex scenes both physical and telepathic pave the road to true love for brilliant billionaire scientist Lily Whitney and Captain Ryland Miller, the leader of a squad of psionically gifted soldiers who have been imprisoned and separated from each other after receiving life-threatening enhancements. When Lily's father called her in to consult on a top-secret project he was working on for the government, he had no idea that he was signing his own death warrant or that his beloved daughter with her psychic talents would witness his murder and become a target for the traitors who were bending his project to their own evil purposes. Ryland lends his psychic strength to Lily and ignites a passion that brings him and his men into her high-security estate. Action, suspense, and smart characters make this erotically charged romance an entertaining read." ( Booklist)

Too MUCH!

I do not mind the occasional sex scene, especially if read by good narrator. This book however, did not contain sex scenes. What it did give the poor reader was a spinster’s idea of sex in a tub of syrup. Exhausting! Utterly to much burning love, throbbing this and that’s. Too much feeling and explanation of feeling – so to justify the frequent sex. This book had potential, but the writer killed it with long scenes that was supposed to be sizzling, but just bored the living daylights out me.

Not enough happening.

I had to force myself to keep reading.

I liked the overall outline. The characters are trained military guys given drugs to create psychic powers, but at times they have pain from it. The plot sounds ok. Bad guys want to sell this process to other countries and kill anyone in the way.

The problem is filling in the pages. Most of the book is boring conversation and ponderings about feeling bad, sad, angry, and what to do. Lily feels bad because her father was killed. Lily is upset when she learns what her father did in the past. They talk about what to do about the bad guys, but there is no interesting process of discovery. It has some heroine stupidity because twice Lily goes “alone” to the bad guys’ place saying to her buddies “I’ll be fine, don’t worry.” But something bad happens to her. Other action scenes could have been shown but were not. For example, we don’t see the guys escape from their cells. We don’t watch the scenes when people are killed. There are a couple of action scenes toward the end that were shown, but they were vague and unsatisfying - for me.

When Lily and Ryland first see each other there is an instant bond. Then their conversations sounded like an old married couple. Of course there are several sex scenes. Those are full of “I want you so bad... You feel so good...” It felt like a cheesy campy old-style romance novel.

I know many readers liked this so there must be some appeal.

The narrator Tom Stechschulte was good. I liked his deep sexy alpha male voice.

Genre: paranormal romantic suspense

Awesome Book!!!

I love this series and was so glad to see Shadow Game, which is book 1 in the GhostWalker series, was finally picked up for audio. Shadow Game sets up the whole series about Doctor Peter Whitney who experiments on men to make the perfect commando team that can work together, talk to each other without speaking, have paranormal powers like being able to make guards look the other way, blending in with the background and control over animals. They also have super hearing and can see in the dark. When Dr Lily Whitney, Dr Peter Whitney's daughter, who also has the same type of powers as the men, is brought in on the project, she wonders if her father is a genius or a madman. Of course there is a love story as well that will blow your mind.

The narrator, Tom Stechschulte, is a brilliant choice for this series. He has a different voice for each of the GhostWalkers (the team of men in this series), and having listened to the other books in this series, he keeps the voices true to each character, in each book. Awesome!!

Christine Feehan is such a good author and I always have a hard time waiting for her next book to come out, no matter which series it is in. I really loved this book and will listen to it again and again.

ENOUGH ALREADY!!!!

I read one of the later Ghostwalker books. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the team of soldiers and their adventures. I thought this book would be interesting to listen to because it showed the way the Ghostwalkers got their unusual powers. WOW, was I mistaken! This should appear under the section labeled Sexual and Erotic books, Pulp Fiction or Romance Novels. To say the author was attempting to titillate the reader would be giving a pale description of the the exceedingly graphic love, no, let's say, SEX scenes. The story is horribly sacrificed to the ENDLESS, explicit, sex scenes. They're needlessly long and overly descriptive. This is supposed to be an adventure/mystery story, not something out of the Bunny Ranch Diaries. I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of Audible's books over the past years. This one not only left me cold, but angry, because of its blatant and overdone sexuality mucking up the story. There should be a warning put in for the explicit sexuality so that young readers aren't unknowingly subjected to it.

Awful, Never Ending Love Scenes

I thought this book was going to be the story that is listed. Unfortunately it's really all about the romance of a woman and a creepy love interest. There were no less that 5 long love scenes in the first half alone. Two of which were dreams. I fast forwarded only to find that the love scenes were still taking place. The story sounded good but this is just junk.

Sensual and Action Packed

Captain Ryland Miller is a basically a "rat" in a cage as are his men in his military unit. They volunteered for a highly classified experiment to enhance the psychic abilities they each had. Dr. Peter Whitney is the head scientist with Colonel Higgens the military liaison. Several of Captain Miller's men have died of "brain bleeds" and other suspicious causes. They are all separated and can only communicate infrequently via telepathy.

Dr. Whitney and Col. Higgens come to talk to him and have brought guards and Dr. Whitney's daughter, Lily who is also a doctor and scientist. Dr. Whitney has asked his daughter to consult on the project as he is not sure why some of the men have died.

Ryland is immediately drawn to Lily and she to him. They communicate telepathically which scares Lily at first. Shortly after she is linked with her father and she realizes he is being killed and almost doesn't separate herself from him in time but with Ryland's telepathic help she does. In the coming days, no one else seems to know her father is dead not just disappeared and Lily becomes worried as she delves into her father's secret laboratory and papers finding secrets about him and herself that are very hard to take in.

The story progresses as Lily helps Ryland and his team break out and shelters them. Ryland, Lily and his team also work to find out how his other men died and who is responsible as it soon becomes apparent it is not Dr. Peter Whitney.

My one main problem in this story. I can't beleive I am saying this because I love a good sex scene. However, I felt there was too much spent on Lily and Ryland falling into bed and/or having sex in dangerous places almost every other page. I would like to have had more time spent on both the "bad" guys and the members of Ryland's team to get to know their characters more and what they had actually gone through being part of this experiment.

I still really enjoyed the book and although I felt there a few too many sex scenes they were well written and hot.
Tom Stechschulte was outastanding in the delivery of the story

boring, predictable, and repetitive

This book just didn't do much for me. I thought the science fiction aspect of the plot was great, but that was its only redeeming feature. The book goes on at great length about the main characters' feelings for each other (I'd swear entire paragraphs are copied and pasted multiple places in the book), but the way their relationship developed wasn't particularly interesting, and I didn't feel particularly invested in how things turned out for them. I also listened to another book in this series and it suffered from the same problems. It's a shame, because I really want to know what happens in the larger sci-fi plot line, but I just can't take any more cut-and-paste sex scenes and vague, overwrought sentimentality.

A little heavy on the sappy but good all the same

I'm a must say I enjoyed the book. I first read this book a few years ago and decided to listen to the second time to refresh my memory. I really enjoyed Christine Feehan has an author, particularly in the dark Carpathian series.
Listening to this book somehow I made the book sappier then when I read it, not sure if it was the author or just my recollection of reading versus listening to the book.

I typically like my books to have a little bit of conflict in the relationship I like for the main characters to have to really work for the HEA. This book was just too goody two shoes I think. The main character was supposed to really good at all of this telepathy in supernatural kind of powers but she just seem to be whiny and needy to me.

I do like the concept of the series so I think I'll listen to the next book in the series. I'm hoping that the women will get a little tougher and the men in a little more cautious and hard-core on the relationship front.

✫✫ 4 Stars ✫✫

It's been years since I listened this book but I remembered really liking it so I decided it was time to listen to the audiobook again. I love the idea of the modified group of hero's and that the government is afraid of what they created in these men. I love the physic abilities, that is why this series stands out above all the other special ops hero books.

I really enjoyed Lily and Ryland working together to get the team out of the wrong hands and to protect Lily after her what happens to her father. I loved all of that but what i could have done with out is the insta-love. I really can not get into a love that has no history and on that same note, there is nothing worse than a twenty something virgin heroine who gives up her virginity the first night, why hold on to it for that long then just give it up. That just doesn't work for me. Besides that, I love the plot and where the series is going on from here.

The narration was great. He does a great job with all the voices and different accents. It's always great to listen to someone that doesn't narrated every audiobook released.

Drivel

Drivel, simply drivel. I have never read anything by Christine Feehan, and won't try again.

Tedious

Good storyline but WAY too many sex scenes. The first couple were fun and exciting but they just got so boring. What started out as an entertaining and interesting book became a tedious trudge through sex scenes that were all incredibly similar.

I was glad when it ended, but also disappointed that it showed such promise at the start but the constant boring sex simply ruined it.

Dull and repetitive

I found this book extremely dull and repetitive. How many times does the writer have to say the same thing? The narrator is really awful as well, delivering the script in a voice that just makes me want to go to sleep. I only heard an hour of it, I kept trying to persevere, but it was absolutely, diabolically dull.

Not suspense, more like 50 shades

This was just porn on paper! Didn’t add any value to the story. The story may have actually been really good without all the sex scenes! But not my genre of choice! This needs to be labelled accordingly, very misleading.

Very disappointing

I have over 900 audio books in my library and this is the 3rd I have given up on. A very poor plot with far too many tedious sex scenes. I gave it until chapter 10. I can see why the narrator struggled.

I'm not eating those cinnamon rolls

It was a struggle for me to finish this book. I'm a fan of syfy and was very disappointed, if you are into erotic books, go for it. The summery promised a good tale. But the story is weak and totally overshadowed by the excessive and cringy sex scenes. Thats what is totally overpowering this book. I find the main characters absolutely stereotypical and the dialog between them is exhausting sometimes. The woman character was not likable, shes supposed to be something special but she doesn't come across well. There were times I actually said, out loud, "get over yourself woman"! And as for the cinnamon rolls, if you go for this book, you'll figure it out.

Struggled to Finish!

I was intrigued by the story thought it would be an action thriller type book, Unfortunately it turned out to be Mills and Boon mush...a bit cringe. I liked the narrator but not enough to finish the book.

A missed opportunity

The underlying story of this book is a great concept, and generally well executed, however, the sex scenes are too frequent, too graphic and diminish from the overall story. Unfortunately, because of this, I have been unable to finish the book.

behind the mush there a good plot

I must admit i couldn't finish this book. It's a shame because there was a good story behind all the bodice ripping but there was just so much of that i wanted to vomit at times. I kept going to see what would happen next but with while chapters devoted to broad shoulders, lustrous hair and hard nipples it began to feel like a waste of time.

Worth a read

Story could actually be great but way to many sex scenes. We get it already! Move on with the story!!!

A Solid 3-Star Paranormal Romance.

I have read some books by Christine Feehan before; however, Tom Stechschulte is a new-to-me narrator.

The story was good. I enjoyed the plot; medical experimentation on US soldiers, espionage, fight for life, found family.

The narration was good. I didn't get confused during multiple-character conversations. The voices fit the characters.

What I didn't enjoy was the endless internal monologues about how our protagonists felt about each other. Many of which were going over the same ground and not progressing the story. It became tedious, and I found myself fast-forwarding the recording to get passed it on more than one occasion.