Review by Mel Odom
Published August 11, 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.

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 book, there was simply no putting it down. I blazed through the story and had a great time. Readers wary of vampire and vampire hunter novels are encouraged to pick this one up and give it a go. There's a lot here to sink your teeth into.