Teenagers looking for thrills get more than they bargained for when an exclusive party turns out to be a vampire feast and they are on the menu. Many escape but some die-and they don’t stay dead.
A psychologist (who runs a boarding house on the side, oh and designs original clothes) reluctantly teams up with her new tenant, a university lecturer in ancient cults, to hunt down the master vampire behind the parties.
But nobody is who they seem to be and old wounds must be opened before they can be healed, the master defeated and long lost lovers reunited.
I have read a couple of Heather Graham’s works and found them to be reasonably entertaining but this is like nothing of hers I have read before. This story is, quite simply, confused. It doesn’t know whether it is a paranormal romance, a suspense, a mystery or an urban fantasy so it tries to be all four and fails dismally.
It starts out reasonably enough, even though the heroine does seem to have a few too many strings to her bow, but about a third of the way through the story changes direction. It goes from being a romantic suspense with paranormal elements set firmly in the world as we know it to being a bizarre fantasy where suddenly the heroine and her friends are all vampire hunters of one sort or another before it slides into truly weird where the heroine is, in fact, a very old vampire and the hero an equally old warrior sworn to kill her and all her type and the antagonist an ancient foe of both.
No effort is made to explain the un-foreshadowed changes in direction, in fact, the plot was so disjointed I felt as if I had put the book down half way through then picked up a different story and read its second half by mistake. This feeling was compounded by the very sketchy character development which left me with the distinct impression of being dumped in the middle of a series. *
It was difficult to overlook fundamental inconsistencies like the heroine stating that she runs her psychology practice out of her home but then seeing clients in her office down town. I could have managed that if the rest of the book made any sense. But it didn’t. Sadly even the setting seemed confused. Two Scottish ancients end up in Rumania, for some reason the party there could not have taken place in New Orleans where the bulk of the novel is set, before finally heading back to their ancestral home for the final showdown. It left me wondering what the point in all the travel was.
Heather Graham does what she does (mildly spooky romantic suspense) well. I don’t know why she went off the rails so badly with this book.
I like this author but Kiss of Darkness left me thinking WTF?-Lynn
*I have since discovered that many of the secondary characters have been protagonists in novels written by Graham’s paranormal writing alter ego Shannon Drake. Why it was decided not to publish this under that pseudonym I don’t know. I now feel not only disappointed in the quality of this work but disgruntled that nothing on the cover of this book, or inside it, alerts the reader to the fact that it is series related.
It will be a while before I read anything by Drake or Graham again, if I ever do-Lynn.
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