Book Review: Seize the Night - by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Synopsis: Seize the Night is #10 in Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunters series. Valerius is an ancient Roman who comes from a REALLY bad family. He's another hero who nobody much likes. He's closely related to the guy who tortured and killed Kyrian 2,000 years ago (Kyrian is the hero in Night Pleasures). There's also no love lost between him and Zarek (the hero of Dance With the Devil), whose past is also interlaced with his. And it really doesn't help that Valerius has a kind of a holier-than-thou attitude that gets on EVERYBODY'S nerves. So, of course, he's paired up with Tabitha, the fun-loving vampire-hunting goth-chick human twin sister of Amanda from Night Pleasures. They are thrown together one night when he happens upon Tabitha kicking some Daimon ass in an alley and she gets carried away and stabs him in the chest. Fortunately, he's immortal and doesn't die, but she does end up letting him hole up at her place for a bit while he recovers. He finds her in-your-face earthiness and lifestyle (read: she owns a sex shop, has a transvestite roommate, and fights soul-sucking Daimons by night) to be offensive to his higher sensibilities. But in the end, he comes to love her anyway - and also learns to lighten up a bit.

SO MUCH happens in this novel. By the time you get to the last 80 pages or so, you will not be able to put it down. Things happen in this book that dramatically impact the rest of the series as a whole. AND you get a great romance to boot! This is one of my favorites in the series. Tabitha is such a marvelous character. In the hands of a lesser author, she could easily come across as abrasive, obnoxious, and wholly unfeminine. But Kenyon does an outstanding job of making her tough, funny, and just vulnerable enough that you can't help but love her. And that is exactly why the romance is so believable in this book. Valerius is kind of a stuffed-shirt, but he has such a sad past and you really do want him to have a chance at happiness. And you also see how, deep down, he really does want to be loved by someone - and has love to give in return. The author really does know how to take a character who's such a jerk with loads of flaws and turn him around to make the reader root for him anyway. I love that kind of redemption.

This one got 5 stars in my LibraryThing catalog