I finished book five in the wee hours of the …afternoon. Well it seemed wee like as I sat on a stone bench plowing through the last thirty pages or so. But maybe they weren’t wee, maybe they were really big giant minutes squished into the impatience of waiting for my ride.
Ah, but was it good?
Yes.
I guess that’s all I need for the review right?
Okay, I will elaborate, elucidate and just plain tell you why I thought it was good.
First let me tell you that I didn’t think the book was going to get a “must read” attitude from me at all. Unlike the previous jaunts into the Dark Hunter world, Kiss of the Night didn’t get good until page 100 or so.
The first 100 pages go on and on and really make the heroine, Cassandra, seem like a spoiled kid and Wulf, our Dark Hunter of the hour, an overprotective oaf. Ms. Kenyon’s love of the word “predator” just doesn’t initially fly here.
This book in some respects is very playful. Wulf’s squire, Chris, is actually his great, great, great (add as many greats as you can sputter off for a 1000 something year old vamp-like dude), grandson and the only human who can remember Wulf after meeting him.
You see, Wulf is cursed. Humans can’t remember him five minutes after they leave his presence. So the dude has a lonely life. There are some of the supernaturals that can recall him, but of course we all know by now that Dark Hunters drain each other’s powers when they spend too much time together and, well, everyone else is mostly evil or somewhat intolerant of hanging with Dark Hunters.
But that’s not even the interesting part of the story. It’s poignant, but not the meat and potatoes of the goings-on in this volume. The fact that Cassandra is an Apollite is.
What does that mean to Wulf? It means he really shouldn’t be with her, in love with her, or even friends with her. He kills her people when they go Daimon. So what we have here is some interracial dating. How’s that for modern genetic diversity?
The rest of the story is gravy, like the sex, like the big bad coming after Cassandra for being not just an Apollite, but one that holds the fate of the world in her hands. In her hands? How ’bout with the threads of her very soul?
We also meet some new characters, like Stryker and Urian, two bad ass Spathis. Their tales are quite the curious ones and maybe even a surprise and who is this Kat? She’s got some duality going on. We have to wonder if that’s a good thing or not.
All in all Kiss of the Night eventually delivers in Kenyon’s grand DH style. You’ll have to crawl through the initial “dream sex” sequences and the boring university crap, but oh well. (You know she could have played on Chris’s attraction to the woman Wulf eventually gets, but oh well. How many pages can you actually burn on this stuff?) But it’s all worth it.
It becomes an exciting adventure with sex, mayhem and the best part of it? Kenyon actually creates a little uncertainty. There are few things that you want to happen, but will it? Can it be possible and if it is, should it be possible? What does Ash sometimes say?
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
That was Ash, wasn’t it?
Have fun, creatures of the night. I will, I’m off for some Night Play!!!!!
© 2008
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