Nightwalker (Dark Days, Book 1)

I've been a fan of Buffy for a long time, but there was one thing I always wondered about. Namely, why would a vampire ever bother going to Sunnydale, knowing the Slayer lived there and was likely to dust the vamp as soon as he or she arrived in town? One would think a vamp could live a longer, more peaceful life simply by avoiding the Slayer's stomping grounds, right? After the first chapter of Jocelynn Drake's _Nightwalker_, I think I get it. 600-year-old vampire Mira squares off against seasoned vampire hunter Danaus in a scene that just crackles with adrenaline. Danaus is a danger to Mira, but he's also an equal to spar with, and the chase is exhilarating. Drake hooked me here and never let me go. Before too long, Mira and Danaus find themselves making an uneasy truce in order to battle an enemy who threatens them both: the naturi, who have the distinction of being among the scariest iterations of the fae I've ever seen in urban fantasy. Mira has history with the naturi. Five hundred years ago, she was rescued from torture at their hands on a bloody night she doesn't remember very well. Her quest to stop the naturi's new plot will force her to revisit this trauma and to question everything she thought she knew about vampire politics and whom to trust. Drake strikes the perfect balance between action and characterization. The globe-trotting, swashbuckling plot never lets up for a minute, yet there's plenty of character development and interaction as well. We care about the characters, so the combat is never mindless hack-and-slash. The pace is relentless, so the story never slips into brooding inertia. Mira is a delight. If you're worried that a 600-year-old protagonist might be too powerful, don't be. She's actually more realistic than some urban fantasy heroines who are impossibly perfect despite, theoretically, being ordinary human women in their twenties. Mira makes mistakes, gets her butt kicked a couple of times, and isn't good at everything. She mentions early in the book that she doesn't know her way around guns. She gets a few lessons later on, so she's no longer completely inept with firearms, but she doesn't become Instant Annie Oakley, Just Add Blood. Mira is just powerful enough to win some of her battles, and just vulnerable enough to lose some, and that's the way it should be. And as for the relationship between Mira and Danaus -- let's just say they burn up the pages without even *doing* anything. Also fun were the little nods to some of the older, better Anne Rice novels. See if you can spot the characters who are (almost certainly) tributes to Lestat and Louis! I was frustrated with the ending of _Nightwalker_, but it's the kind of frustration that gives me something to root for in the next book, Dayhunter (Dark Days, Book 2). Go get 'em, Mira.

I wasn't sure I would like this novel at first. Mira's description of herself seemed a bit self-glorifying. " . . . landing with the sure-footed grace of a cat." "I cut through the air as if I were made of night." But when I read on, I was glad I had. This is a really, really good read. I liked the development of Mira's character. She is so confident of her own power and place in the world but by the end of the book her confidence has eroded when she understands she may have been used and betrayed. Drake has the descriptive ability of Anne Rice in her Mayfair Witches and Vampire chronicles. I really felt the atmosphere, especially in modern day Egypt. Mira's ambiguous relationship with Danaus is open to so many possibilities and although there is no graphic sex, you sense the sexual tension between them. I found myself saying "no, don't kill him!" I can't wait to read the next book and see where it takes them.

'Nightwalker' is the first of the 'Dark Days' series and was a really enjoyable beginning with a slightly different take on the common vampire/vampire hunter theme. Mira is a vampire, over 600 years old, who has been living quietly in the New World for over a century. She's rather unusual in that she has elemental mastery over fire and has the nickname 'the Fire Starter'. When she discovers that a mysterious human vampire hunter, Danaus, has been picking off vampires in her area, she decides to sort him out. She very quickly discovers that Danaus isn't your average human and also that he's not actually trying to kill her - at least not at the moment. Danaus shows her evidence that an evil race, the naturi, are regathering and are planning to destroy both vampires and humans. But what role does Mira have to play? Do events five hundred years ago in her past mean that she may be more important to the naturi than she realises? I really enjoyed reading this book with its different layers. The relationship between Mira and Danaus was excellently written as they both begin to see through their prejudices and to begin to look at each other differently. The author kept us guessing about how things would work out in the book although I did feel that perhaps not quite enough threads were completed when I had finished this first episode. I also felt that the vampires' fear of the naturi seemed rather over the top when the naturi appeared relatively easy to dispatch, at least for Mira and Danaus. Nonetheless this was a good book with an interesting world of vampire behaviour and a mysterious hero. Originally published for Curled Up With A Good Book © Helen Hancox 2008

I saw Jocelynn Drake's new book everywhere - and I avoided it. I have to be honest. We're having a glut of vampire/vampire hunter books out in the reading market and I really didn't think I could handle one more series (and they're always a series). So I passed it by. Again and again. But I have to admit, that cover haunted me and finally broke down my resistance. I was in Salt Lake City on a four-hour layover after I'd finished my current novel on the plane and wasn't in the mood to hold the hardcover I'd brought along as my spare. I walked into the bookstore looking for something that might catch my eye - and there was that cover again. I picked up the book and started reading. The beginning isn't anything special, and I felt like I was reading a book I'd already read before for a time. Then Drake started bringing in the history of her magical races. Not only that, but her heroine is 600 years old and has evidently lived a turbulent life filled with love, betrayal, pain, and bliss. She's got a lot of baggage, but she's handling it well overall. Until the Naturi arrived and proved to be more than Mira could easily handle (even with her fireball throwing abilities), I wasn't impressed. Then Drake started weaving in the mythologies of the Naturi, Nightwalkers, and the Bori, and the enmity they have had with each other for thousands of years. I wasn't truly hooked at that point, but I was impressed. Danaus, the vampire hunter who should have been Mira's mortal enemy, instead finds his fate interwoven with hers - and that of the Nightwalkers, in a way that he (and this reader at least!) couldn't see coming. He's a total alpha male, but at first Mira seemed to physically manhandle him. Then he revealed some of his own secrets and the tables drastically shifted for Mira and me because I was caught just as off-guard as she was. Drake is being canny about her secrets in this book (and yep, it's the first of a series known as DARK DAYS -- although the stories mostly take place at night) and doles them out like crumbs. This is going to work for her for a while, because I'll be picking the books up to assuage my curiosity about what's really going on and where all these people truly come from. NIGHTWALKER is written in an elegant style. The prose is easy to read and a pleasure to read. Drake does a good job of describing the people and the surroundings so that I felt like I'd stepped into those shadowed alleys, riotous vampire bars, and dusty tombs as well. The travel parts of the novel regarding the trip to Egypt were especially well written and I look forward to more of the same in later volumes. Mira has lived a long life and I would love to learn more about how she feels walking through lands she hasn't seen in potentially hundreds of years. Drake has set her heroine up with past lives and past enemies that can prove to be interesting, as well as the ongoing war that's just shaping up. After I got about fifty pages into the b

First of all, I'm a guy so I don't really get into the romance side of novels at all... If you could compare the plot line to a movie or movies, I would say it's like Underworld meets Blade meets Queen of the Damned..sorta.. That being said, I was given the book for a flight home and was pleasantly suprised. Quite a bit of action and "lore accurate" history in the book that most times is not necessarily found in this genre. Light on the romance side, (to my personal liking). I will most likely pick up the next one to see how this story line develops. I give it a a definite thumbs up! Chris