In cooking, it’s not just one element that makes a dish succeed since the freshest and finest ingredients only go so far. If the wrong cooking style is used or a dish cooked too long, it may fall flat. So too, in a book, an interesting concept is not the only element needed for a winning style. In Sins of the Heart, the author has a darkly fascinating world for her characters, but it’s paired with much telling instead of showing, and a story that feels disjointed at times. As a result, what could have been the kickoff to an interesting series instead feels rather mundane.

On the plus side, the world of this book shows a lot of promise. Eve Silver blends elements of Ancient Egyptian and other beliefs with her own touches to create a world in which soul reapers harvest darksouls for the Underworld god Sutekh. Naturally, the darksouls of criminals and similar persons with much darkness inside them hold the most appeal. However, even those who feed on the evil of the world have enemies. In the soul reapers’ case, this would be the Daughters of Aset.

Dagan Krayl is no ordinary soul reaper. As the son of Sutekh, Lord of Chaos, he is a very powerful reaper. While on a harvesting mission for his father, he is taken by the plight of a young woman he finds being held captive in an abandoned factory used by his target. After killing the kidnapper and harvesting his darksoul, he saves the young woman, telling her to go and live her life. That young woman is Roxy Tam, and eleven years later her path will cross with Dagan again.

However, this time around, the two stand on opposite sides. Unknown to Dagan, Roxy is now a Daughter of Aset. Dagan’s brother has been killed and Dagan is trying to find those responsible for the act. Roxy is attempting to rescue and protect a kidnapped child and something about the kidnapper in this case appears to have drawn Dagan’s attention as well. The two end up joining forces and eventually, after plenty of mental lusting and verbal sparring, a romantic relationship starts to heat up. The romantic relationship itself isn’t bad, but it doesn’t really get going until about halfway through the book, and by that time, many readers will have probably stopped caring.

The mythology underlying Silver’s world is complicated and at the beginning at least, very interesting. At first, I contentedly meandered down various trails of plot trying to figure out how everything fit together and building a mental picture of the book’s world. This started to grow rather tiresome, though, because of the author’s insistence on telling readers how everything works rather than showing it. There are dense paragraphs of narration and explanation to set up just about everything in this book. In fact, most of the first 150 pages or so serves merely as background for the later action to come. Readers need to know some of Dagan and Roxy’s backstory in order to make sense of the rest of the book, but there’s a little too much scene setting here and not quite enough story. It seems like page after page of explanations of and ponderings on Aset, Sutekh, soul reapers, blah, blah, blah.

And then suddenly, we get a break from the constant explanation and foreshadowing as our lead characters are thrust into The Attack of the Flaming Concubines. Coming seemingly out of nowhere as it does, the scene feels more than a little bizarre at first. However, it does serve the purpose of kicking the action up a much-needed notch. Once things really swing into gear in the second half of the book, it becomes much easier reading as readers see the theoretically intriguing paranormal world in action. However, even as it felt like the plot might be going somewhere at last, the book just didn’t hang together all that well, and it comes to a rather abrupt end. It was as if too many elements had been thrown into it and they were not blended well. Perhaps over the course of the trilogy it will end up working, but it didn’t come together in this first volume.

When a dish isn’t well cooked, the result will usually fall flat. So too, with this novel the promising elements were not put together smoothly and the result is a book that felt merely ordinary. Sins of the Heart ended up being a less than promising start to a new series, and I’m not sure I’ll feel particularly driven to read any further. I’ve enjoyed this author’s writing in the past, but I think I’ll stick to the backlist for now.