How Beauty Met the Beast (Tales of the Underlight #1) by Jax Garren

Paranormal

While this is a beauty and the beast story don’t expect it to follow the fairy tale exactly.  Beauty does meet the beast but the beast is a veteran whose scars are from burns.  Her father has nothing to do with their meeting, but he may be one of the bad guys.   Beauty is Jolie Benoit and the Beast is Wesley Hauk.  They have to work together to rescue Jolie’s niece.  Although Hauk’s looks scare Jolie at first she comes to trust him and consider him a friend.

This is a new world and quite a bit of world building has to be done to set the stage for this series.  The Underlight is a worldwide organization that fights The Order of Ananke (They want to control everything in the world).  In Austin, Texas the Underlight lives in a community located underground.  Jolie learns of the Underlight and The Order of Ananke when Hauk saves her from kidnappers and takes her into the Underlight.

This is a good start to a new series.  The writing is very good and the plot is well planned and executed.  I loved both Jolie and Hauk.  They were both well-developed characters.  There were several secondary characters that added to the book.  There was not HEA for this Beauty and this Beast but maybe in the next book.  I can only hope as I wait for the next book in the series.

Carina Press published How Beauty Met the Beast by Jax Garren in 2012.