(This review may contain spoilers).
This book actually contains two misses for me. 1: It’s about vampires. 2: It’s about destined love. Both of these have become over-used in books and destined love is very rarely handled well.
So why did I pick this book to read? The plot sounded good. And Alec was a policeman, rather than a high school girl.
The reason this book gets three stars is actually not because of the romance. The sheer amount of information dumping made it very hard to read the book. There was really only any action right at the beginning and towards the end. During the middle scenes, I was lulled into the same sense of complacency the main characters seemed to be. During one scene where there’s an attack, I actually didn’t realise that was happening, since there was little to no buildup.
There were a lot of really sweet, tender moments between Cronin and Alec and I felt that Alec’s reactions to the ‘destined love’ thing were actually realistic. There was time taken to allow them to grow.
The concept of the vampire culture being ‘hidden’ in modern culture would have been an interesting one, but I never got to see or learn anything of that for myself. I actually did have a major issue with the book at the beginning, as I thought it seemed really odd that Alec would just pack up his job and not even consider what he might do. It would have been good to know what made him decide to be a police officer in the first place.
I did like seeing some of the other vampires and learning about what they could do; but, again, it would have been better to be shown rather than told. Many of the secondary characters weren’t developed enough for me to really care about what happened to them.
The inclusion of Egyptian mythology would have been an interesting twist, if it weren’t for the above-mentioned information dumping. I think this book would have really benefitted from less dialogue and more action.
It’s a toss-up whether I’ll read the next books in the series or not. I liked Cronin and Alec together and their romance felt real. I cared about it. But the rest of the plot was very much a miss.