4 Star Book Review | Honor Bound by Ann Gimpel

HONOR BOUND (GenTech Rebellion #2)
by Ann Gimpel
Published: June 9th, 2015

We have to trust to fight side by side, but love’s so unexpected—and so irresistible —it trumps everything.

Honor takes a huge chance and flees her compound one wintry night. A genetically altered woman, she has no memories from before her kin staged a rebellion seven years before. Because of her enhanced physiology, she finds a home working for the CIA alongside four other women just like her. There are still plenty of rules, but they’re different, and she’s figuring out how to blend in.

Milton Reins burns through women and marriages. After the third one implodes, he swears off hunting for a replacement. Running the CIA is a more than fulltime job. There’s no time for anything else in his life, which is fine until Honor comes along. Training in the gym throws their bodies together and makes him remember the feel of a woman in his arms. Milton aches for her, but she’s a freak—the CIA term for test tube humans designed by scientists.

Honor wants Milton with every bone in her body, but it’s a terrible idea, especially after she delves into his head and sees his ambivalence toward her kind. Need drives them together, but their differences create roadblocks every step of the way. Fueled by anger and fear, she shuts him out. So what if the sex was great, she’s done.

Or is she?

Cover Review:

I really like the cover for Honor Bound. I love that it looks like they've got each other's backs. The colors compliment each other. The only negative I have for this cover is that they way the woman is holding the gun looks a little strange.

Book Review:

The stakes are higher in Honor Bound! The teams are training and getting ready to hit more of the compounds when, out of the blue, high activity is detected for all locations but one. The compound nearest them. What they find there is both horrifying and hopeful.

Honor is one of the genetically altered human women that escaped their compound in the first book, Winning Glory. In Honor Bound, Honor finds her own love in Milton, the leader of the CIA. But it's not easy for either of them. Honor doesn't have much experience  and knows even less about human behavior and relationships. Milton has had three failed marriages and he's build a wall around himself that's almost impossible to get through. Add to that all of their differences, the extreme danger, sexual tension, and meddling friends, and things between Honor and Milton get complicated really fast. But there is a happy ending for these two that really made my heart light, especially after a certain life and death situation that had me on the edge of my seat.

The teams get two new recruits when they hit the first compound in the beginning of the book. Nameless Ones, Frank and Tony, both geneticists, claim amnesty. They chafe a little with the new command structure, but they are instrumental in the saving of one of Honor's friends, Charity. This helps set up the foundation for Charity's book.

With Frank and Tony's arrival into the fold, we also learn that the V4 are taking over all the compounds, but they are unstable. Their genetic material is being compromised. And that's not a good thing. At all. Having ticking time bombs leading an army of enhanced humans has positives and negatives, but I have a feeling that nothing good is going to come of it.

I have loved reading Glory and Honor's books and I can't wait to read more about Charity next!

Rating:

I gave Honor Bound a 4 STAR rating. I loved reading about Honor and Milton. They were able to beat very bad odds and love each other with their entire hearts. I loved the new addition of Frank and Tony. Learning a bit about their life as Nameless Ones was interesting. And the fight against the "freaks" is getting even more dangerous!


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Ann Gimpel is a mountaineer at heart. Recently retired from a long career as a psychologist, she remembers many hours at her desk where her body may have been stuck inside four walls, but her soul was planning yet one more trip to the backcountry. Around the turn of the last century (that would be 2000, not 1900!), she managed to finagle moving to the Eastern Sierra, a mecca for those in love with the mountains. It was during long backcountry treks that Ann’s writing evolved. Unlike some who see the backcountry as an excuse to drag friends and relatives along, Ann prefers solitude. Stories always ran around in her head on those journeys, sometimes as a hedge against abject terror when challenging conditions made her fear for her life, sometimes for company. Eventually, she returned from a trip and sat down at the computer. Three months later, a five hundred page novel emerged. Oh, it wasn’t very good, but it was a beginning. And, she learned a lot between writing that novel and its sequel.

Around that time, a friend of hers suggested she try her hand at short stories. It didn’t take long before that first story found its way into print and they’ve been accepted pretty regularly since then. One of Ann’s passions has always been ecology, so her tales often have a green twist.

In addition to writing, Ann enjoys wilderness photography. She lugs pounds of camera equipment in her backpack to distant locales every year. A standing joke is that over ten percent of her pack weight is camera gear which means someone else has to carry the food! That someone is her husband. They’ve shared a life together for a very long time. Children, grandchildren and three wolf hybrids round out their family.