The positives;
It's an ambitiously detailed story. No pwp here.
The dialogue is better than the dialogue of the other romance novels I'd been perusing.
It's not pwp.
The "voices" of the characters are reasonably consistent.
The negatives:
Let's start with the cover. The cover above is the one on the book I read. It is a horrible photomanip. What are the spikes on his arms? Oh, wait, are those supposed to be the branches of the tree that does down only one side of his body? And his hair is supposed to be either wavy or curly (can't remember) but it's not that mullet. Also, he's supposed to have a silver choker on through most of the book. Did we forget that super important part?
The book. Okay, I understand the need for suspended disbelief, I really do, but you have to establish the rules of your world, and do it as fast as possible. I feel as if the author said "rules, I don't need no stinking rules!" and the story really suffers for it.
We start off with a character who seems like she could be interesting, I mean, she's been having these terrible dreams about being burnt alive and this dude looking on and laughing about it and then there's the dude. Cue freaking out. Reasonably so. Except, the guy comes over, and he and his friends manhandle her elderly friend (who's name...Miss Mable I think, got really old after about the 20th time it was said. She's not a Miss, she's 80, and we don't live in the 70's. I mean, apparently the main character didn't even know the woman's first name, which is lame for a caregiver) and her "cool" friend.
Also, the "panic attacks" that she kept experiencing were not at all like panic attacks as I know them, which always pisses me off, when books project panic attacks in ways that are not real to life. First of all, it's not just about breathing, it's about this overwhelming FEAR response, and eventually the fear of the fear. It's an ugly fear cycle that sucks you down in some of kind vicious black undercurrent. I was also bothered because having a panic disorder and being a coward are not the same thing, and yet, in this book, they seemed to be.
Trust and sexual tension didn't build too fast, but it was still unbelievable. The lack of voicing concerns even when the situation gave the opportunity for it was also irritating. The love interest (Blane?) was irritating both in his aggression, his conviction to leave the heroine (I may have misspelled that word) completely in the dark, and then tell her everything, and then mind-f*** her.
The heroine (again, possibly misspelled) was also bothersome in that she didn't...think like a normal person. There was just a lot (like the vampires/witches) that wasn't explained. A lot that presumed on the reader having extensive supernatural knowledge. And, then, I had this moment where the protagonist (there I can spell that word) was all like "I'm psychic? I didn't know it! I mean, that can't be possible, I've only been having these visions for years which I was totally sure were real and I'm being chased by fire, and man, I saw you coming, like, two years before I met you. But I can't be psychic. I just know the phone is going to ring sometimes." And then, "Woah! I can lift a big rock! I haz soopurpowrz!" It was such a disgustingly ...marrysue? moment that I almost put down the book. If the author's bid, and I'm sure it was, was to give the readers a moment where they thought they could be the protagonist, that was it. She chose something that almost everyone experiences and said it was really special, except the effort was really transparent and so it felt like a gimmick.
The mythology was troublesome. It was like the author tried to throw an entire book series' worth of mythology at us in one book. The bit about "they're what you call demons" was irritating. If they are what we call demons, call them demons, don't give them a new name. If they're like what we call demons but different, or our understanding of them is fundamentally flawed, explain. Each chapter seemed to add new mythology without explaining, or with barely an explanation of, the old. The stuff about breeding the protagonist stank of a number of other mythos, and felt tagged on. The main characters themselves seemed to be a mix of Feehan's Carpathians and another author I've read but am too tired to recall, some kind of eternal guardian... Anyway, it's not that taking things from leaders in the genre is bad, it's not, but it has to feel like your own work, or the nod to the inspiration has to be obvious.
I stopped reading after the friend committed suicide, which was already probably 50 pages later than I should have. The sex scene was not sexy. The bathroom scene was kind of sexy but totally different than all the other sexual tension scenes.
This brings me to another point. The voices were fairly consistent but the characters themselves were not. The male protagonist especially often changed gears or attitudes without so much as a by your leave to the readers. Not cool. And, for a guy who is really really really old, he has pretty modern (read; selfish and kinky) ideas about sex.
I never finished the book, I wasn't going to waste my time on another 100 pages when more than 200 hadn't been enough to keep me reading.
I really wanted this to be a good book. But it wasn't.
If I was giving it a rating it would get a 2.5 of 5 stars. It could have been worse.
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