Category Archives: Paranormal Romance

Taste of Darkness
(Darkness, #2)
By: Katie Reus
Publisher: Self-Published
Published: July 24, 2014
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Rating:

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He spent more than a thousand years imprisoned in hell…

Drake is an ancient dragon shifter, one of the most powerful beings in existence, but a millennium trapped in utter darkness has left him ill-equipped for modern society. If it wasn’t for Victoria, the sweet female brave enough to befriend him, he’d be lost. She’s smart and gorgeous and everything he never dared dream of during his years of agonizing loneliness. He may not have anything to offer her, but one thing he knows for sure: he’d die to keep her safe.

Only to fall into the heaven of her touch.

Victoria is a wolf shifter, healer of the Stavros pack. She’s seen a lot, but she’s never met anybody quite like Drake, the fiery, fascinating shifter who can blaze through the skies unseen by mere mortals. He’s lost, dangerous, and the last male she should fall in love with, but the more time she spends helping him navigate modern life, the deeper—and hotter—their connection becomes. She’s thrilled when they finally locate his family, but reuniting with his people plunges them both into unimaginable danger. It’s a race against the clock trying to figure out who wants them dead and who they can trust, especially when the threat is closer than they ever imagined.

Even though this storyline focuses on two different characters from the last book, you really need to read them in succession. When I started reading this one I felt like I was missing something. The characters seemed way too familiar with each other and there seemed to be some time gap in what was going on for the book to just be starting. So I reread the ending from Darkness Awakened and refreshed my memory of how these two characters met. Then afterwards I was able to jump right in the story with no problem.

Drake was a very interesting character. Yeah, he’s all macho Alpha, he is a dragon after all, but he’s way out of his element in the modern world and leans on Victoria and others for help when it comes to the unknown, like driving. You see, when Drake was a little boy he was sacrificed and sent to the depths of hell where he spent over a thousand years trying to survive. That is, until he escapes and finds himself protected by the Stavros wolf pack. So imagine everything that’s changed in the last thousand years. It’s pretty safe to say that Drake has a lot to learn about the new world. He grew up in hell and doesn’t really have the lifetime experience in dealing with people. So he tends to be a bit gruff when interacting with others. He also has no memory of who he was before his time in Hell. So over time, little things trigger his memory, slowly revealing who he was as well as snippets of his gruesome time in Hell.

I do have a couple of complains and one was ironically Drake himself. I felt that for someone who hadn’t grown up in the modern world, he sure did acclimate fast. For instance, my mom has had a cellphone for almost 10 years now. That woman just learned how to text. When she came out to visit a few months back she tried telling me that her phone only came with one ringtone, the carriers signature tune. Knowing that wasn’t right I, within seconds, changed her ringtone to some obnoxious DJ BLAST tune. It took her a couple of weeks to figure out how to get rid of it, and I think she even enlisted the help of someone. So considering that Drake’s only been in our world for four months, I’m not buying that he’s able to pick up on our technology so fast. Maybe had I seen the transition period in those first 4 months that would’ve been different, but we are presented with the Drake who’s been around for 4 months and I wasn’t a fan of the fact that homeboy was texting like it’s cool.

My other issue was that I felt like there were way too many POV’s going on. I’m totally fine with getting a couple extra POV’s mixed in pertaining to either the villain or upcoming highlighted characters but this one was all over the place. I honestly don’t know who the next book will be about because there was just so many things going on at once. I would have liked it to focus a bit more on the main characters and their story and not try to branch out twenty different ways.

Since Drake was sent to Hell as a little boy, he was never told about the birds and the bees. Let alone did anything with a female. Victoria’s been coddled and babied since she was adopted into the pack. So she never really had the opportunity to date. So the fact that these two were starting out on equal ground was pretty interesting. It’s not too often that you have two older characters who are both virgins. It was a nice change of pace.

The romance isn’t the only thing this book has to offer. There are some pretty awesome fight scenes as well. Since whoever put Drake in hell is still out there, there are some moments where things get a little bloody. You have to figure that Dragons don’t fight with fists or weapons. So there are a lot of scenes where Drake chomps onto a neck and rips the head from the body or incinerates the person with his fire breath. That may be a turn off to some, but he’s a dragon. If he went around throwing glitter on everyone it wouldn’t be very threatening. And dragons are huge threatening creatures that would make Godzilla pee in his non-existent reptilian pants.

In the end, this is a great paranormal romance series. I’ve loved just about every book of Katie’s that I’ve read. This one started out strong for me but once everyone started butting in with their POV’s I got a little distracted and lost sight of the story at hand. It was still highly enjoyable though. I will definitely be waiting for the next book to come out.

“The predator inside him took over, gaining a stronger foothold. He must do this to survive. No weakness. Ever. The boy inside him cried out for his mother, begging her to find him, to save him.
But she never came.”

Previous reviews from Darkness
Darkness Awakened