Book Review: Kiss of the Night - by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Synopsis: Kiss of the Night is #7 in Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunters series. It is the story of Wulf, a Dark-Hunter who is cursed by the gods so that nobody he meets ever remembers him after about five minutes (with the only exception being members of his own family and other Dark-Hunters). Cassandra, the heroine, is half-human/half-Apollite. She has been hunted all her life because, apparently, she is the last direct descendent of somebody or other important and if she dies, then the whole Apollite curse will either be lifted OR the world will come to an end. (I forget all the particulars.) The premise in this book was stretched a bit thin, I have to say. However, you really do have to feel sorry for the Apollites. Cassandra, like the other Apollites, is cursed by the god Apollo to die on her 27th birthday. And she meets Wulf just a few months shy of her birthday and they eventually fall in love. Unlike the first few books, this one is set in St. Paul, Minnesota. We get to meet some more Were-Hunters in this book, including Dante, a were-panther who gets his own short story in the anthology Stroke of Midnight.

Overall, this was probably my least favorite of the Dark-Hunters books. I just wasn't crazy about Cassandra. The whole book she is kind of a Debbie Downer. Also, the romance isn't that great. My favorite character in the book was Chris, Wulf's last remaining living relative. He's pretty funny. However, there is a LOT of important character and storyline development in this one, so it is a necessary read to understand what is going on in the rest of the series.

The best part about this book is that you get to spend a good deal of time getting to know all about the Apollites, which are pretty important to the overall story arc of the series. See, the Daimons whom the Dark-Hunters are sworn to destroy, are really just Apollites who don't want to die on their 27th birthday. In order to cheat their fate, they take the life (and soul) of human beings to stay alive. Kenyon does raise an interesting morality question in this story. You find yourself wondering, what would I do if I were fated to die like that? Would the taking of someone else's soul be justified? What about taking the souls of just the really BAD people, like Charles Manson, or George W. Bush?

I gave this one 3 stars in my LibraryThing catalog