I saw Jocelynn Drake’s new book everywhere – and I avoided it. I have to be honest: we’re having a glut of vampire/vampire hunter books out in the reading market and I really didn’t think I could handle one more series (and they’re always a series). So I passed it by. Again and again.
I have to admit, that cover haunted me and finally broke down my resistance. I was in Salt Lake City on a four-hour layover after I’d finished my current novel on the plane and wasn’t in the mood to hold the hardcover I’d brought along as my spare. I walked into the bookstore looking for something that might catch my eye – and there was that cover again.
I picked up the book and started reading. The beginning isn’t anything special, and I felt like I was reading a book I’d already read before for a time. Then Drake started bringing in the history of her magical races. Not only that, but her heroine is 600 years old and has evidently lived a turbulent life filled with love, betrayal, pain, and bliss. She’s got a lot of baggage, but she’s handling it well overall.
Until the Naturi arrived and proved to be more than Mira could easily handle (even with her fireball throwing abilities), I wasn’t impressed. Then Drake started weaving in the mythologies of the Naturi, Nightwalkers, and the Bori, and the enmity they have had with each other for thousands of years. I wasn’t truly hooked at that point, but I was impressed.
Danaus, the vampire hunter who should have been Mira’s mortal enemy, instead finds his fate interwoven with hers – and that of the Nightwalkers, in a way that he (and this reader at least!) couldn’t see coming. He’s a total alpha male, but at first Mira seemed to physically manhandle him. Then he revealed some of his own secrets and the tables drastically shifted for Mira and me because I was caught just as off-guard as she was.
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