Sometimes when I’m reviewing a book, especially a book I know isn’t a keeper, I fold over the upper right corner of a page to remind myself that something there bugged me. My copy of Night Pleasures looked like an accordion before I was even a third of the way through.

Amanda Devereaux is the normal one in a family of paranormals. One sister hunts down vampires, another reads tarot, and everyone else has some type of psychic ability. Amanda prides herself on her ordinariness, and deliberately develops a low-key life as an accountant with a dull fiancé. This is the way to happiness, she thinks, until her fiancé meets her family and breaks off the engagement. Then, very suddenly Amanda is pulled into her sister’s vampire world when she is accidentally kidnapped.

Desiderius is a daimon extraordinaire. In his desire to get rid of Amanda’s sister, Tabitha, as well as draw out his enemy, Kyrian the Dark-Hunter, he mistakenly snatches Amanda. She wakes up in a room somewhere – hand-cuffed to Kyrian. Neither of them wants to be there, and they certainly don’t want to be there with each other, but both feel an instant attraction and affinity for each other that remains even after they have been physically separated and are fighting the dark powers of Desiderius. But is there any way for a human like Amanda to get anything resembling a Happily Ever After from a soulless creature like Kyrian?

The first half of this book, which deals primarily with Amanda and Kyrian’s developing relationship, is almost a complete loss. Their love story was both unbelievable (their immediate and complete absorption with each other was inexplicable) and unbelievably tedious. Kenyon over explains every single emotion Kyrian and Amanda feel. The reader is in absolutely no danger of having to interpret anything as Kenyon tells us in detail what they’re feeling whenever a feeling happens to pop up.

First, there’s the constant – and I mean every-third-page constant – lust think. Passages like this one are common and show up on page after page:

He wanted to keep her breathless. Wanted to taste her passion fully. Kyrian’s lips itched to kiss hers, his hands ached to touch her body until she cried out with pleasure. Gods, but this woman tempted him as he’d never been tempted before.

It’s highly unnecessary to tell the reader over and over and over and over how much these people want to have sex with each other. Each repetition adds nothing new to the story and takes page space away from writing that might have been interesting.

Then there’s the endless angst over why Kyrian and Amanda can never be together. I know I’m not the only reader who is irritated by the lame, “I can never trust another woman” scenario. Here’s Kyrian’s rationale for why he and Amanda are destined never to know love.

He hadn’t felt this way in so long, no, he corrected himself, he had never felt this way about another woman, not even Theone. This wasn’t just lust or love, he felt a bond with her. They were like two parts of a single heart. But it was a lie. It had to be. He didn’t believe in love anymore. Didn’t believe in much of anything.

Of course, except for his innate distrust of all women, Kyrian is the perfect guy. He’s an oh-so-noble prince, who saw his own death, had his entire family and country ruined because of his wife’s betrayal, but couldn’t bring himself to take vengeance on her. He loves kids. He yearns for home and hearth. He’s generous to a fault. He’s gorgeous with soft, masculine lips and a buff bod. He’s so perfect, he’s unreal. He should have at least one fault, besides his misogyny. A fault might have made him interesting.

Amanda is equally unrealized. We know she’s a priss who’s repressing her paranormal side. We know she’s got the hots for Kyrian. We know she wants to be boring and normal. Other than that she remains undeveloped. She shows little emotion when her fiancé dumps her. He’s a gump, true, but they did have a relationship. Her house burns to the ground, and she moves on with only the vaguest of grief. She’s too mesmerized by what’s in Kyrian’s pants to have any other thoughts about anything.

The rules of Kenyon’s world are fairly complex, and so numerous that characters have to spend paragraphs of clunky exposition explaining to Amanda (and thus, to the reader) how the paranormal creatures operate. Kyrian is a vampire, but he’s not really an orginary vampire. He’s a Dark-Hunter. Many of the normal vampire restrictions are different for him. And there are other Hunter creations out there to take out evil in the four dimensions: time, space, earth, and dreams. One assumes they all have their own rules and characteristics as well. These creatures are all spawned from the gods of ancient Greek mythology, which adds another layer of confusion for the reader to sort out.

Kenyon makes numerous attempts at humor throughout the story, but most of it did not succeed for me. There were a very few shining moments, but there were also a couple of jokes that I literally groaned at, they were so bad.

Only two things save this book from a failing grade, the first of which is Nick, who, as Kyrian’s squire, helps him with the logistics of his life and work. Nick was fairly fun and rather multi-dimensional for a secondary character. And the book picked up a bit in the second half when the focus was off Kyrian and Amanda and on the fight with Desiderius. Of course, the very end was highly cheesy and needlessly complicated, but at least it wasn’t agonizingly repetitive.

I’m very disappointed to have to write such a negative review for Night Pleasures. I was looking forward to reading this book. I like vampires and the paranormal, and my colleague, Mary Novak, gave Kenyon’s last book, Fantasy Lover, a very good grade. I was expecting better. This appears to be the first in a lengthy, already planned-out series. I can only hope that the series gets better as it progresses because this book isn’t a very promising start.