Rachel Fortier is a planetary specialist, she came to Harp believing she was there to study the planet's animal life forms. Unbeknownst to her the real reason was to help hunt and capture one of the cat shifters.
Aiden is a cat shifter, while out patrolling the Green he comes upon a ship that has landed on Harp illegally. Deciding to investigate the ship in his cat form, he is captured and caged. Lucky for him Rachel has decided to save him and try to foil the plan to capture the cat shifters.
I really enjoyed this book. It was well written with great characters and interesting/engaging storyline. Rachel and Aiden were both likable characters with great chemistry. The story was well developed, well paced and had lots of action, drama, great secondary characters, romance and steam. Highly recommend !

The first book in the Shifter Planet series came out four years ago and it left me wanting more. I'm so happy D.B. Reynolds revisited the planet of Harp. Her ability to build a world unlike any other is fantastic without overshadowing the characters or plot. Rachel and Aidan had loads of chemistry and the give and take kept me hooked. The pacing of the story was perfect without unnecessary additional information. A must-read for lovers of paranormal romantic suspense. I only hope it doesn't take four more years for the next installment.

Rachel thinks she’s traveling to Harp to study the wildlife when in reality the crew she’s traveling with want to capture the big cats . It doesn’t take long for their true purpose to come to light and unfortunately it’s Aidan who runs headlong into their trap. So when Rachel realises that she’s been duped and she decides not only to save the cat that she thinks of as hers but also trek through the undoubtedly inhospitable forest. Rachel might not know about Shifters but it’s pretty apparent that Aidan can’t just ignore her but how can he protect her without betraying his ability to transform ?
So as a reader I couldn’t help but think oh boy this is about to get very interesting and I can happily say that this couple who both have secrets do pretty soon start to trust each other. Plus I absolutely loved that Aidan got to see that Rachel might be an Earther but she’s a very capable person and far more resilient than he ever realised and can even come to his rescue !
This author always gives her readers strong, uncompromising heroines and the character Rachel we meet here is no different. Yes sometimes her male leads are perhaps a tad misogynistic but it all adds to the fun and I thought Aidan had a wicked sense of humour that was readily apparent. Now add in what I can only describe as sentient fauna with singing trees and you start to realise that the world building here is something entirely different !
There’s lots of action and the romance had a credible, believable pace whilst still being pretty steamy at times. I actually preferred this to the first book and do think it works as a stand-alone although obviously if you can please do read in order as it enhances your enjoyment. Best of all is the way we learn more about the Green and the antecedents of the Shifters on Harp with quite clearly lots more to come and I’m really looking forward to reading more.
This voluntary take is of a copy I requested from Netgalley and my thoughts and comments are honest and I believe fair

I loved the first book and were looking forward to this one for years! LOL

I like the planet Harp and its environment so much! I love their culture, even if it is a little bit elitist. In this case it's normal: the shifers are the top of the evolutionary chain. They are the top predator of the planet and also the part of the population thanks too whom all the others survived, being them part of the plant ecosystem.

It was interesting to read about that. The semi-sentient planet which rejects the intruders. So the survivirs of the colonist had to do something or die killed by the planet. And they tampered with their genome and produced the shifters.

All that is the huge secret the people of Harp keep form everybody and also the big secret Aidan must keep from Rachel who's obviously bewildered. She has proved herself and her moral code time and time again, but she just knows that Aidan is hiding something and keeps thinking all the wrong things.

Aidan is very conflicted: he trusts Rachel, but the secret is not only his. On it depends the existence of his whole world!

I loved both Aidan and Rachel. They were both very strait-forward persons with high moral code. And thier feeling for each other were also true.

The action is non-stop as in the previous book. Rachel must overcome her "shortcomings" because she's human, but she's tough enough to do it and to do it very well! Aidan ahs it easier since he's a shifter, but he's honest enough to admire Rachel for her force of will and her physical resilience.

Because Harp's Green is deadly! And we see ample demonstrations of its deadliness!

We know since the beginning who's the villain, but we never discover who's the villain's boss, so I think there's ample space for a sequel that I'm going to love to read!

This is Rachel and Adiens story. First time reading this author and I loved her! Rachel visits the planet harp on a scientific expedition. Or that’s what she was told. When the team she is with attacks the forest in order to lure out one of the big cat species to capture, she’s horrified. She helps the cat escape. But the cat is a shifter named Adien. Read the story to see how Rachel goes through all kinds of perils, to save her cat.

I read this book as an arc from NetGalley

This was a really fun read. I loved the alien element, and the world that was created for this shifter story. It was alien, but still was written in a way that makes you think it could exist and isn’t crazy foreign. The only problem I had, and might be due to ignorance, was the feeling it was part of a series. I didn’t see anything that indicated that, but the addition of chapters about other characters felt that way.....

I loved how strong The heroine was, and that Aiden was a little silly,

Earther Rachel Fortier is a well-regarded biologist who agrees to undertake a mission to the closed planet of Harp where new and exciting species tantalize her. Once on the ground she realizes the true mission is to capture and apex big cat predator on the planet for military use and experimentation. After she understood that she has been duped, Rachel determines to foil the crew’s plans.

Aidan Devlin, one of the top shifters in his clan, sees the ship land knowing the team members are up to serious no good. He also notices Rachel who seems apart from the crew. When Aidan is captured in his animal form, Rachel helps him escape not knowing his true nature. Rachel leaves the ship determined to make the dangerous trek to the only city on Harp to confront someone who is a traitor to the denizens of the planet.

After Aidan’s escape, he tracks down Rachel and agrees to escort her on the extremely perilous journey. It is sometime before Aidan’s true nature is revealed and by then, he and Rachel have formed a very mutual attraction. She is less than pleased to have been keep in the dark; however, Rachel is keeping some secrets of her own.

Aidan and Rachel are a bit frustrating in that their secrets make everything a lot harder than it had to be, but then this paradigm creates the story as well as the reason for their long trek into a very scary and treacherous place. It also gives a chance for their relationship to develop although there are still obstacles in that aspect to overcome once the hidden truths are revealed. This is the second in the Shifter Planet series. It can be read as a standalone, but the story will be enhanced by reading the first book. The world building is quite interesting and unique combining shifters with sci-fi adventure and romance which is all quite enjoyable

‘Shifter Planet: The Return’ plunges us back to a future where a long-isolated earth-colony comes under scrutiny by Earthers once again, and with it, its closely-guarded secrets that threaten to come to light. I’ve a soft spot for this series ever since D.B. Reynolds brought Harp and its shifter-inhabitants to my e-reader, so it’s more than welcome to see that she isn’t done with this world yet.

But while Reynolds’s world-building is fascinating, detailed and complex, much of it feels—quite literally—as the title suggests, a return to the first book, plot-wise as well, only with 2 different protagonists who are much like the first book’s pairing. Aiden and Rachel Fortier face Harp’s wildlife as their main threat as well as a traitor in the midst, with Earth’s growing interest in what Harp can offer.

Reynold’s biggest attraction perhaps, was an incredibly capable heroine battling prejudices (sometimes even with a hint of misogyny Rachel faces), showing time and again how she shouldn’t have been underestimated in the wild as she took more than adequate care of herself. I couldn’t exactly understand her dogged determination to walk straight to the enemy other than the insistence he needed to be confronted and that her reputation was on the line, but it was the driving momentum behind Rachel’s actions, along with a carefully-orchestrated series of events that led to the big reveal.

Deception played a big part here nonetheless; lying by omission and distrust carried on for a while and I was relieved actually, to be past that at around the halfway mark.

What proved to be the book’s annoying downer was probably Aiden’s manwhoring ways that were repeatedly thrown in my face, then justified immediately after by the fact that casual sex was encouraged among shifters and how much the ladies loved him and how many women he’d screwed. There was the mild implication Rachel was a woman Aiden could lose his heart to and make him want more because she could handle herself around him and in the wild when the rest of the soft city-women couldn’t, and that felt vaguely insulting somehow—as though he’d needed someone to meet those standards to ‘change’ his ways, so to speak when the rest wouldn’t get a sniff since they weren’t good enough.

As much as I liked the epic adventure through the planet, the romance fell short at the end: a hurried few lines about whether Rachel should leave for earth, an even quicker declaration of love and...that’s it. In fact, much of it felt incomplete, with an epilogue that had nothing to do with the main pairing and a vague suggestion that this isn’t the last we’ll see of Harp and its inhabitants.

In short, I wasn’t too sure what to make of this. It’s a compelling read—this made me stay past my bedtime—but it’s the realisation afterward that the similarities this bore to the first book and a rather unlikeable ‘hero’ for much of it that gave me pause about what could have been a higher rating.

Full review to be published online in late October.

2 Stars for the first half of the book, 4+ Stars for the last half. I’m going to be generous because I like this author, and the story did eventually get much better.

I wanted to love this book, I really did. But I had so many issues with the first half of the story. On the surface, it was a great adventure. A return to Harp meets Romancing the Stone. Unfortunately, when the reader looks underneath the surface, it was a mess. I won’t go into spoilery detail; but I will say that in order to make the h, a highly experienced and respected biologist/scientist, fit the way she wanted the story to go, the author made her tstl in so very many ways. It became almost a chore to read a character drawn as such a dummy, just to fit the plot point and keep the H’s big ‘secret’. Not to mention the highly inappropriate and cringe worthy sexual banter with a complete stranger she met in the middle of the night and just started traveling with, no one questions asked. Rape, anyone? If the story itself hadn’t been so much fun, I think I would have dnf’ed it. Yes, some things in the plot and the character of Rachel annoyed me that much.

Fortunately, by the halfway mark, the story greatly improved, and saved the read for me. The big secret was out and the book raced to a happy conclusion without further demeaning Rachel’s intelligence. The bad guys were defeated, and Harp was saved. There was also some satisfactory catch-up with Rhodry and Amanda.

Sooo…If you don’t peek under the surface at the myriad inconsistencies, the book is a good adventure tale. Don’t look too deeply or expect too much, and you’ll have fun.