Dark: A Dark Paranormal Romance by Kat KinneyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A Sexy Romp with Werewolves and Vampires in the World of Blood Moon, Texas
If there’s one thing that Dark shows, it’s that author Kat Kinney does nothing half-way. It’s a story replete with werewolves, vampires, sex and angst, and the convoluted plot flows relentlessly to an unexpected, but well thought out conclusion.
Humans have recently learned that they share the world with shifters and vampires, and an uneasy truce is in place. Against this backdrop, Hayden Crowe, aspiring rocker and part-time barrista is assaulted one night after a gig by a feral werewolf and bitten. Stunned and frightened, she instinctively flees to an old flame, Ethan Caldwell, proprietor of the coffee shop Dark, to help her cope with her radically changed life. Ethan is a born werewolf, who is aware of the difficulty of integrating a newly bitten into the community of packs, and afraid that he won’t be able to do it for Hayden, which will result in her death.
Dark is billed as a romance, and it is, and any good romance must explore the ebbs and flows of a newly-forming relationship. Kinney does that, in spades, with plenty of steamy sex scenes interspersed with attacks of angst brought on both by raging emotions and the werewolf virus coursing through the characters’ veins. The characters are rich, developed both by narration of current events and backstory, with chapters in the past written in italics to help the reader keep track of the era. There’s also the mystery – who did this to Hayden, and why?
If Dark has a failing, it’s that the author tried to cram too much into one story. It is a laudable effort, but for me, it fell short, and it was just too much to keep track of. It was a kaleidoscopic read that necessitated backtracking to keep track of all the disparate threads, and that prevented total immersion in the storyworld for me. I was most interested in the mystery, so I found it tedious to be yanked back into the love story – this is always a problem with hybrid works like this. So I give it four stars, but if you like this genre, I think it will be well worth your time and money.
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