I’ve enjoyed Erin Quinn’s books, both under this name and as Erin Grady, so it never occurred to me that Haunting Desire would be anything other than a good, solid read. However, this novel just wasn’t that at all. It’s not a bad book, but it lacks that certain mystical, magical quality needed to draw the reader fully into its world.

Shealy O’Leary and her father are arguing over her desire to go to Ireland when the unthinkable happens. Somehow the world opens up and after a struggle, Shealy finds herself drawn into a mysterious world with the warrior Tiarnan and his brother Liam. Her father has disappeared, and she learns that she herself is in Inis Brandubh, inside the Book of Fennore where Tiarnan and his brother live as exiles. Shealy has heard the name Fennore thanks to her father’s obsession with the Book of Fennore, but beyond that, her new world is disturbingly foreign to her. Tiarnan and Liam waste no time impressing the dangers of the place upon her and Shealy sees plenty of mysterious things about this new world that prove to her that she has come to a very dangerous realm.

Though wary of Shealy, Tiarnan takes her along with him as he travels to find his way back to the small band of people he lives with . Along the way, Shealy and Tiarnan begin to feel powerfully atrracted to one another, a feeling that only grows as the trip progresses. However, they face many dangers on Inis Brandubh and there is also the puzzle of Shealy herself. The way in which she got to Fennore is rather mysterious and, as soon as she mentions her father’s lifetime quest for the Book of Fennore, she immediately comes under suspicion. The mystery surrounding the Book of Fennore combined with the monsters and various horrors the characters encounter make for an action-packed tale. However, there are questions throughout the book that just don’t get answered and the many threads of plot don’t all pull together smoothly. For that reason, this book can at times become difficult to read.

I’ve enjoyed the other books in this series and thought they were beautiful, but I just couldn’t connect with Haunting Desire. Neither lead character really spoke to me, and parts of the plot that really should move the reader just didn’t do it for me. For example, there is a scene in Fennore where a terrible monster attacks Tiarnan’s village and I could tell that this scene was meant to affect me as a reader just as it so obviously and deeply rocked Shealy. But it didn’t. The chemistry between story and reader simply was not there. As a result, I subsequently found it difficult to muster up empathy as a reader for Shealy and Tiarnan as they dealt with the various threats of their world.

Not only is there a lack of story chemistry, but an additional problem exists with the distance between the reader and the leads. Shealy went through a traumatic accident several years before the main action of this story and the rebuilding of her scarred face made her a medical miracle and celebrity – and a tortured heroine. Tiarnan was a leader among his people, but was exiled inside the Book of Fennore after trying to destroy it and as a result, he carries a huge burden of guilt with him in his dangerous exile. These characters should have compelled me, but they didn’t. Instead they felt oddly flat and I often got impatient with the story as a result. Instead of a beautiful love story and edge-of-my-seat adventure, it just read as, “Shealy’s insecure, Tiarnan’s tortured, Fennore’s cursed, blah, blah, blah, ooh-hot sex!, and blah, blah, blah…”

In the middle portion of the book, the relationship between Tiarnan and Shealy grows closer, but this gets a little lost sometimes as I slogged through the aftermath of an encounter with a monster, strange appearances of various characters, some scenes which appear to be a set up for the next book in the series, more nattering about the Book of Fennore, and so on. The series does have an overarching theme, but it gets a little muddied in this particular installment. As a result, parts of the book meander and. while the world of Fennore remains interesting, there’s just something missing here. That missing magical quality keeps this from being something I can recommend.