Dark Slayer by Christine Feehan

What was I thinking?

I’m a huge Christine Feehan fan. I love her writing, the way she describes emotions, personalities and tortured heroes and heroines. The last several books have focused heavily on the Carpathian’s deep relationship with Mother Earth and I absolutely love that Ms. Feehan can make me feel that same bond through their words and actions. But, the stories had begun to be somewhat predictable (probably because I read the first 19 back to back) and my adoration of the Carpathians began to fade, so much so that I put off reading this book for over a year.

And don’t I just want to kick myself now!

Some of you will understand this, and some of you won’t, but not since Zsadist walked across the pages of Lover Awakened and into my life, have I found such tortured souls as I have in Razvan and Ivory. Their betrayals at the hands of those they loved and trusted, their loneliness, and their uncompromising sense of honor in the face of unimaginable horrors was both heartbreaking and heartwarming – and dare I say it? I believe that in Razvan I might just have found a tortured hero almost as near and dear to me as my beloved Z. And if you don’t know who I’m talking about, you really need to read The Black Dagger Brotherhood series by J.R. Ward. Really!

And Ivory. Wow, what an amazing heroine she turned out to be. She's strong, determined, honorable and one of my all time favorite heroines. And she is probably the only person in the world who could ever relate to Ravan’s suffering and be able to understand his level of self hatred, because she herself has so much of the same emotions. And one of the things I most loved about her, was that we didn’t spend ¾ of the novel hearing about how she didn’t want to be Razvan’s lifemate, that she wanted to be her own woman! How she didn’t need any male, and blah blah blah. She knew that she could be herself and his lifemate. I LOVED that she accepted Razvan for who he was and who he wasn’t, knowing that he accepted her in the very same way.

I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a Carpathian novel this much in a long time. We get to revisit so many of the earlier characters and see how they’ve grown. How much they’ve learned! I laughed, I sighed and I cried like a baby. Dark Slayer has totally rekindled my love of the Carpathian people who continue their struggle to to defend and ensure the existence of their race, and do so while maintaining their honor and not losing their souls to the dark.