JEANIENE FROST
Synopsis: Chicago private investigator Kira Graceling should have just kept on walking. But her sense of duty refused to let her ignore the moans of pain coming from inside a warehouse just before dawn. Suddenly she finds herself in a world she's only imagined in her worst nightmares.
At the center is Mencheres, a breathtaking Master vampire who thought he'd seen it all. Then Kira appears – this fearless, beautiful...human who braved death to rescue him. Though he burns for her, keeping Kira in his world means risking her life. Yet sending her away is unthinkable.
But with danger closing in, Mencheres must choose either the woman he craves, or embracing the darkest magic to defeat an enemy bent on his eternal destruction.
First line: Mencheres smelled blood even before he caught the earthy scent of ghouls clustered on the ground floor of the decrepit warehouse.
Stats for my copy: Mass market paperback, published by Avon Books, An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2010; received through BookCrossing.
My thoughts: I love the Night Huntress Books. I love Cat, and I especially love Bones. The Night Huntress World books are spin-offs, featuring supporting characters from the other books. This one features Mencheres, Bones' grand-sire. Mencheres is, in his own words, “older than dirt”. He's also extremely powerful and has been well known for his visions of the future. However, he's recently lost that power and now he only has one vision – of a vast darkness. He takes this vision to be a portent of his pending death.
Kira is a private detective, who is walking home from work one night and hears the sounds of someone in pain coming from an old warehouse. Unable to walk away from someone who may need help, she goes into the warehouse where she sees Mencheres being tortured. Despite her fear, she pulls out her gun and demands “put down your knives”. Of course, since the torturers are ghouls, Kira is the one who ends up having to be saved by Mencheres.
After getting her to safety, Mencheres prepares to mesmerize her into forgetting what she saw. Except it doesn't work. He stares into her eyes, and she looks right back at him, and nothing happens. He thinks maybe it's because he forced some of his blood down her throat to heal her wounds – maybe his blood has made her temporarily immune. So he tells her that he cannot allow her to leave until the effects wear off and he can mesmerize her.
In the Cat and Bones books, Mencheres was never one of my favorite characters. I want to say I didn't dislike him, yet I think in a way I did. Maybe because Cat disliked him...I'm not sure why. Getting to know him and learning more about his background is nice. I like him a lot more now. Not as much as I like Bones, but then I'm starting to realize I may never like another vampire as much as I like Bones. Seriously. I'm head over heels about Bones. Which is a little embarrassing at my age, I mean for Pete’s sake, he's a fictional character in a book.
I do really like Kira, however. She's a wounded soul, who's heart was broken in the past, along with her dreams of being a police officer. She lives a pretty solitary life, not being close to anyone besides her younger sister, Tina. She doesn't want be attracted to Mencheres. Well, who in their right mind wants to be attracted to a vampire anyway. Especially when they've only just learned that vampires do exist.
Anyway, there's an enemy of Mencheres who wants his power and will stop at nothing to get it, there's lots of conflict and battles and hiding out and longing looks and self-discovery and so forth.
I enjoyed this book very much. Much more than the first Night Huntress World book. My understanding is that the next book will feature Vlad, and I'm looking forward to it, though I really wish Ms. Frost would give us a book about Tate.
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