Review: Kiss of Midnight

Kiss of Midnight by Lara Adrian
Series: Midnight Breeds #1
Rating: ★★★★☆

He watches her from across the crowded dance club, a sensual black-haired stranger who stirs Gabrielle Maxwell’s deepest fantasies. But nothing about this night—or this man—is what it seems. For when Gabrielle witnesses a murder outside the club, reality shifts into something dark and deadly. In that shattering instant she is thrust into a realm she never knew existed—a realm where vampires stalk the shadows and a blood war is set to ignite.

Lucan Thorne despises the violence carried out by his lawless brethren. A vampire himself, Lucan is a Breed warrior, sworn to protect his kind—and the unwitting humans existing alongside them—from the mounting threat of the Rogues. Lucan cannot risk binding himself to a mortal woman, but when Gabrielle is targeted by his enemies, he has no choice but to bring her into the dark underworld he commands.

Here, in the arms of the Breed’s formidable leader, Gabrielle will confront an extraordinary destiny of danger, seduction, and the darkest pleasures of all. . . .

It’s funny to me, as I write this review some ten years after the book’s release, that there’s a cover quote by J.R. Ward on the cover. I either hadn’t realized, or hadn’t remembered. What I do know is that I first read this book around the time I was obsessed with the Black Dagger Brotherhood by J.R. Ward. OBSESSED. And it didn’t live up to the over-the-top love that I had for that series at that time.

This book was released on 2007, about the time that Butch’s book, Lover Revealed, was released. I was, consequently, in full-on fangirl mode. Zsadist’s book had been my favorite book yet and this book was doomed by comparison. It’s too similar and too different all at the same time.

You have a band of vampire warriors, living together in a compound, fighting their enemies night after night…You have the damaged one, the one (or a few actually) in a loving relationship, the smart-ass, the leader – who is probably the closest thing to royalty they recognize. Sound familiar? If it doesn’t, it’s only because you haven’t read the BDB books. You’re probably lucky. Despite, or maybe because of, my obsession we had a bit of a falling out several years ago. It started with V’s book.

Why am I talking about the BDB here? Because when I first read this book sometime back in 2007-08, I thought it was just okay. But I didn’t love it. I continued reading for several books, but then it sort of fell by the weigh-side as I became more entrenched with BDB (and Fever, to be honest).

I regret that now. Recently, I had over 8,000 books on my to-read shelf. Not books that I simply wanted to read, but books that I own and had yet to read. It had begun to paralyze me. I couldn’t choose what to read. I couldn’t decide. And it stressed me out. So I’ve spent the last several weeks slowly weeding through them. Sorting out the books that I’ve simply lost interest in, from the books that were secondary books in series I hadn’t yet started, from the books that I actively wanted to read or continue reading. Working backwards, I finally hit Adrian. And I wondered. Should I move it, or keep it. BDB had let me down, and seemed heading down a weird rabbit-hole I didn’t want to venture into (reading reviews of some of the books I hadn’t read yet left me wide-eyed and shocked).

After talking with Sarah I decided I should give this another go. So I started from the beginning. And I immediately saw the similarities that I’d noted before, but this time I noticed that it was all the things I loved about BDB, with none of the things that bothered me. None of the annoying ad-placements, or weird ‘h’s in names. No supremely brooding characters that are assholes for no apparent reason. A very real threat, one that’s actually believable and threatening. A female that thinks, is independent, and doesn’t just accept everything that happens to her, but tries to control her own destiny.

There’s a lot to enjoy here. I’m looking forward to this time reading this through series.