Pocket, $6.99, ISBN 978-1-4165-1196-0
Fantasy Romance, 2007
Dark Angel is the third book in Lucy Blue’s Bound in Darkness series. You can try to read this one as a standalone story but I won’t recommend it as you will be plunged into a pretty busy story, plot-wise, with the story line that ran through the previous two books coming to a head here.
In Dark Angel, our heroine Roxanna is a vampire who was kept in a bottle by her “father” Orlando (see My Demon’s Kiss) until he decided to release her during a confrontation with the villain Kivar. In this book, Roxanna finds herself free but disoriented and confused. The person who frees her by accidentally uncorking the bottle is Sir Gareth. Sir Gareth is the lone survivor of an enemy ambush while he and his entourage were on their way to his grandfather’s place and he survives only because Roxanna comes to his rescue, rendering enemies to pieces and feeding on them like a glorious bad-ass babe. Roxanna also tends to Gareth, reasoning that she wants to keep him healthy so that she can feed on him, but we all know better, don’t we?
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the story, but because I don’t want to spoil too much the previous two books in this series, I will let you find out things for yourself if you want to know more.
Dark Angel suffers from a sagging middle problem, though. After the initial glorious moment when Roxanna turns into a bad-ass killer from hell, she disappointingly enough reverts into a more familiar heroine: the emo angst-laden, sometimes even bizarrely child-like, vampire who ends up being more passive than anything else. It is her quest to kill Kivar, but yikes, it really disappoints me that she doesn’t come close to personally completing that quest in the end. She’s just whiny here, constantly wanting to be a better type of creature. I want that bad-ass killer Roxanna back. There are far too many moments in the early and middle parts of the story where she and Gareth will spend time just moping and make lovelorn eyes at each other.
The more action-packed last third or so of the story is much more entertaining. But still, since this is supposed to be the story of Roxanna and Gareth as much as a wrap-up of the trilogy, I can’t help but to be disappointed by the story. Both main characters have interesting backgrounds, but Ms Blue develops them and their story into just like any other generic emo and angst-ridden romance out there. There is too much passive angst for my liking here, especially on the heroine’s part.
