Reviewed by Catherine Cheek
Nightwalker, by Jocelynn Drake is an action-packed paranormal romance that reads like a PG-13 version of the Anita Blake novels. It has tight action scenes, exotic locales, hot men, and a little power-play.
Mira is a red-headed, violet-eyed, six-hundred year old vampire with both an immunity to fire and a gift for pyromancy. She’s beautiful, wealthy, and doesn’t take crap from anyone.
Mira meets a powerful vampire hunter named Danaus who has been cutting a swath through the vampires in her territory on his way to her. She flirts with him (he’s gorgeous) and fights him, but eventually decides to call a truce when it turns out that Danaus is even more interested in killing naturi than vampires. Naturi are the only thing Mira fears. Mira had a run-in with the naturi centuries before—an incident that left her physically and emotionally scarred—when they tried to sacrifice her on the slopes of Machu Picchu in order to open the seal to the other world.
The naturi are faery-like humanoid creatures whose aim is to destroy all of mankind, and nightwalkers as well. Unlike the werewolves and vampires in this novel, whose traits feel standard, the evil naturi are delightfully creepy newcomers to the urban fantasy scene.
Mira and Danaus travel from Savannah, Georgia to Aswan, Egypt, and then to London, England. In England they meet the rest of Danaus’ rather unimpressive secret organization, Themis, who know almost nothing about vampires despite having studied them for centuries.
In England, the naturi fight them at every turn, including their leader, Rowe, who was among those who tortured Mira in Machu Picchu centuries before. Mira, her bodyguards, Danaus, and Mira’s vampire allies struggle to defeat the naturi before the naturi can complete the spell they failed at Machu Picchu, thereby dooming all humans and vampires in the world.
The strength of this novel is in its fight scenes. The plot moves along briskly from fight to fight, punctuated by a little banter as Mira tries to convince Danaus (and others) that vampires are not really evil monsters. She also flirts with him, and with her human bodyguards, adding a touch of romance that never slips into smut.
Mira stays very moral in other ways too. In six hundred years of life, Mira has never killed a person. She’s slaughtered naturi and disobedient vampires, and uses a blade like an expert (she’s never used a gun either, despite living in Georgia for a century), but she’s never killed a human. Even when she burns down houses (frequently) to hide traces of battles, the human inhabitants aren’t home. She feels very twenty-first century American, and she also feels very young. Mira is no world-weary Lestat; she’s still moved deeply by human deaths.
The tight and fun action scenes kept the plot moving, but I do wish that the author had slowed down long enough to flesh out some of the characters more. Mira has every power under the sun, but we know very little about what makes her tick. With no visible flaws, she feels more like an action heroine than a real person. The novel is written in first person, but as Mira can sense the thoughts of emotions of other people she frequently explains how others are feeling instead of letting them show us.
“Frowning, Gabriel nodded. He didn’t like the idea, but he would follow my directions.”
These shortcuts make the story move faster, but without the secondary characters letting us know how they feel through their actions, they come across as two-dimensional, mere puppets of Mira’s will. It doesn’t help that so many characters blindly obey Mira’s orders without apparent motives of their own.
The novel has a cinematic feel. Mira makes a point of wearing sexy outfits, and all the men are trim and muscular, with jewel-colored eyes. Occasionally this cinematic feel slips a little too far, and Mira describes how she looks to others, as though she were monitoring herself on a video feed.
“I hissed at her, my lips drawn back to reveal a perfect set of white fangs.”
And:
“I smiled back at her, my eyes glowing in the semidark.”
Those fond of straightforward writing might also find that the prose tends towards purple, especially in the incessant discussions of people’s eyes and eye color.
“I realized I liked Danaus’s eyes better. There was something more human in those cobalt depths than Ryan’s glittering gold; something that still whispered of hope. It was missing from Ryan’s eyes, creating a strange juxtaposition. Danaus was a man who said he was doomed to hell, and yet hope still flickered faintly in his precious blue orbs.”
Mira is not a character I’ll think about long after closing the book, but for a fun, simple, action-packed read, Nightwalker hits the mark. It moves quickly, with sexual tension (but no sex) action (but few human deaths) and a lot of pretty people in exotic locales. It would make a great movie.
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