Title: Midnight Awakening
Author: Lara Adrian
Page Count: 369 pages
Publisher: Dell
Genre: paranormal romance
Review copy was one I owned already
50 words or less: Tegan and Elise are both reeling from the deaths of loved ones and vengeance is all that’s pulling them through. That’s no way to live though, as they both discover as they try and fail to ignore each other and what they’re starting to mean to each other.
The Midnight Breeds series continues with Tegan and Elise’s story. I’ll say here at the onset that this is not my favorite of the series so far but it was still enjoyable.
The previous book closed with Elise’s son Camden’s death at the hands of her brother-in-law. Camden was beyond saving; Bloodlust had overtaken him and he was, for all intents and purposes, gone already. Elise didn’t blame her BIL for the death, but she did decide to go to the front lines of the war between the regular Breeds who are just minding their own business and the murderous Rogues that are running around all over the place. This is how she ends up running into Tegan again; he rescues her from a kill gone awry and nothing is the same for either of them after that.
There are a lot of false starts and “aw crap” moments in the first phases of Tegan and Elise’s relationship while they both tried to deny that they were attracted to each other. Sometimes this works for me in a PNR and sometimes it doesn’t, and I was kind of iffy about it here. I will say, though, that one refreshing thing about this book was that the heroine had been born into the paranormal world of the book and we didn’t have to go through the “this isn’t happening, your crazy, I’m going wake up any minute now, la la la can’t hear you” segment that’s standard fare for a lot of PNRs where the heroine thinks she’s fully human until something happens to change her mind.
This book also marks the start of a new story arc in the series and begins a phase where the Midnight Breeds are different from other vampire books that are out there. While there were some things in the book that weren’t quite cleared up (Chase certainly extinguished the kind of embarrassing torch he was carrying for Elise pretty quickly, for example, maybe that’s addressed in future books?) it was an enjoyable book for sure.
Overall Grade B+