Comments:
This is an modern retelling of the old fairytale of Beauty and the Beast.  Instead of descending into maudlin cuteness like the Disney movie, the characters in this book are living, three-dimensional adults.  The "Beast" is truly paying for his hubris with a curse that traps him in the body of an animal, but there are no fairies here--he is a wizard whose own magical mistakes trapped him in his bestial body.
The heroine is truly an admirable woman, one with a keen mind and ambitions beyond seducing the hero.  The ending of the story managed to get the heroine together with her beast without being in any way mushy or contrived.  And while the Beast is coming to rescue her from his enemy, she helps her "Beast" defeat his rival, rather than passively allowing herself to be rescued.  Lackey knows how to write a strong female character who is still feminine.

Final Summary:
This book is excellent, as long as you don't mind fantasy that's based in the real world.

Comments: 
This book has a promising start, with a powerful female protagonist and a promising premise.  The system of magic takes the standard "Four Elements" and puts an extra twist to it.  The concept of the King's Blades is somewhat novel and promising as well.  However, the beginning quickly becomes a thinly-veiled history of Britain, with the female lead becoming Elizabeth I in all but name.  The book does take more creative direction toward the middle, only to mire itself in one of the all-time great cliches that a writer can fall into.  If you for any reason feel the need to read this book, you'll have the ending figured out as soon as Ironhall gets trashed and one of the Blades starts talking about time travel.  
The book ends after the heroine punches the reset button, and in the events of two pages, it is established that three-quarters of the story never happened.  Personally, I found this ending to be a total cop-out.  I did some research and discovered that this is the third book of a trilogy, and it unfortunately turned into a device to fix the inconsistencies of the previous two books.  At the end I was left with an incredible sense of wasted time and effort--the relationships that I rooted for and the story that I had be come engaged in HAD NEVER HAPPENED.  I was disappointed.

Final Summary:
There is a reason why I found this book in the discount bin at Atlantic Books, and it wasn't because they were closing for the season.