Skip to main content

Lynn Viehl: Night Lost

Genre: Urban fantasy/paranormal romance
Series and no.: Darkyn, # 4
Year of publication: 2007
Setting & time: Rural France, England, Ireland and the USA; contemporary

Darkyn lord Gabriel Seran is the prisoner of the Brethren, a religious sect dedicated to eliminating the Darkyn. Chained to a cross and walled in down in the basement of an old chapel on the grounds of his former estate in France, he feels abandoned by the other Darkyn, but is honour-bound to protect their secrets. Meanwhile, burglar Nicola Jefferson is searching for a particular relic in the chapels and churches of Europe while stealing such treasures as she finds and selling them to finance the search. She has also freed a number of imprisoned Darkyn, but when she frees Gabriel something feels different. Meanwhile, the Darkyn king has imprisoned Dr. Alexandra Keller (If Angels Burn) in his stronghold in Ireland, forcing her to search for a cure for the affliction that is slowly turning him into a mutant. Her lover, Darkyn lord Michael Cyprien, is hell-bent on rescuing her, even if it will cost him his life.

This is a much more focused and less muddled narrative than in the previous book, Dark Need, but again I have a problem with the beginning of the love story. The protagonists behave in a particularly brainless fashion by jumping each other’s bones without practically any reason at all while they are in great danger of being discovered by the Brethren. Even with the dream sequences that are supposed to explain the instant attraction, it is still not believable. However, the sex/love scenes in this book are very romantic and the twist near the end is completely unexpected but logical. Over all, I enjoyed this one more than the last one, so it gets 3 stars.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme
Post a Comment
Read more