His Darkest Hunger
Grade : C-

I like a good romance of pretty much any genre, and as I started His Darkest Hunger, I thought I was in for a good paranormal, indeed. Just in the opening chapter, we have betrayal, a damsel in distress, and, apparently, quite the secret backstory waiting to be unraveled. Unfortunately, things stalled out as the hero and heroine wallowed in their pasts for entirely too long and, by the time things picked up, it was too late.

As the book opens, we meet a waitress named Libby who obviously has problems. She's pretty much scared of her own shadow and can barely remember much of anything. In short, she's a deer in the headlights. And just as the truck comes bearing down on her in the form of a mysterious shooter, Libby is rescued by Jaxon Castille, a shapeshifting jaguar.

Considering that Jaxon has been dreaming of Libby's painful, slow death for three years, I couldn't help being amazed that he bothered to save her life. Jaxon and Libby dated three years earlier, but apparently Libby betrayed Jaxon in some horrible, unforgiveable way. At this point, I still wondered what had happened then to make Jaxon hate Libby and I also wondered what made Libby lose her memory. This curiosity carried me through a bit of Jaxon's angst, Libby's dead-on imitation of a doormat, and the less than smooth introduction to the other members of Jaxon's team, whom I presume will feature in sequels.

And then the problems start. First of all, the setup makes no sense. Apparently, these people were all part of some supersecret government unit. Everyone had paranormal powers except Libby, a mere human. No one seems to know why a human was assigned to this paranormal team, and this is a fact that is mentioned many times. For that reason, readers will probably remember it and think it's important. Sadly, this aspect of the backstory, like much of the rest of the background, doesn't get explored deeply until the very end. This will leave readers with a feeling that the story is somehow incomplete - even as we slog all the way through to the last page.

This continues as the main conflict builds. A group that Jaxon and Libby's unit worked against three years earlier is still out there and out to get them. However, the background given for the fight between these people and the unit is rather scanty, so the buildup to some of the climactic action scenes doesn't exactly make the reader feel deeply invested.

Mixed into that is an oddly disjointed romance. There is obviously some powerful chemistry between Jaxon and Libby and they act on it in several scenes. We're also told that something about Libby calls to Jaxon's mating instinct, that jaguars mate for life (although Jaxon did sleep with other women while separated from Libby because "needs had to be met") and, therefore, readers should just accept that Jaxon and Libby will be together. The love story has its moments, but by and large, it just felt too underdeveloped for me.

Not only does the story itself feel disjointed, the characters do as well. Jaxon never came to life for me. He just seemed like a generic alpha male paranormal critter. He spends lots of time alternating between lust and anger toward Libby, but it's hard to feel like one really knows him as a character. Libby is deeply vulnerable and it's obvious she's been through hell. However, she has had too much of her spirit knocked out of her and, beyond seeing that she's traumatized, she doesn't make a strong impression on the reader until nearly 200 pages into the story. It was nice to see her grow some backbone at that point, but it came along a little too late for me and was accompanied by some distressingly TSTL tendencies.

Things do pick up in the second half of the book as the author steps back from the betrayal story a bit and starts to include more of the mythology that underlies Jaxon's shapeshifting world. It would have been nice to have had some of this earlier in the book so as to draw the reader more fully into the story world, but better late than never. The foreshadowing at the ending of the book was a nice touch, too.

Given that His Darkest Hunger lacks a certain polish and overall cohesiveness, I found it a difficult read. The book had potential, but did not realize it. Though matters improved somewhat in the latter part of the book, the long and awkward setup of the story made this less than an average read for me.

Reviewed by Lynn Spencer
Grade : C-

Sensuality: Hot

Review Date : April 7, 2010

Publication Date: 2010/04

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Lynn Spencer

I enjoy spending as much time as I can between the covers of a book, traveling through time and around the world. When I'm not having adventures with fictional characters, I'm an attorney in Virginia and I love just hanging out with my husband, little man, and the cat who rules our house.
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