Samhain Publishing, $4.50, ISBN 978-1-60504-805-5
Fantasy Romance, 2009
Midnight Falls is the fourth book in RG Alexander’s Children of the Goddess series and I’d strongly advise you not to start with this one if you are new to the series.
There are many characters introduced right from the first chapter, characters who already know each other and constantly make references to events that happened in previous stories, so you are going to get quite distracted while trying to figure out who is who and who is sleeping with whom. Ms Alexander attempts to fill in new readers on what happened so far in this series, but she has so many characters coming in to interact with each other during these scenes and making references to past events, I’m not sure how well the reader would have been filled in after the first 15 pages.
The main characters in this story have already met before the start of this story and their relationships will take awhile to explain, but to be honest, after reading this story, I’m not sure whether it is even worth my time to try to explain the plot to you. You see, the pacing of this story is spotty. The author spends the first dozen or so pages to pile on the exposition, but after all that tedious yammering is done with, this story is pretty much all about the mate-mate-mate sex between two primary couples, Liz and some vampire she encounters in the woods, and Jasyn and Hannah. Throughout this, whatever that is not sexual in nature is either more exposition material or unintentionally humorous moments (such as when Nicolette’s voice is coming out from Jasyn’s mouth in that cave).
I won’t be complaining if there is a strong story line here, but the whole set-up is just an excuse for the sex scenes to start coming. Since we are talking about mate-mate-mate woo-hoo stuff here, there isn’t even any build up or subtlety in these scenes. Just the hero charging and ramming it home as if he’s an enraged rhinoceros and the heroine naturally goes into exaggerated throes of orgasm as a result.
Midnight Falls is a tired retread of the formula perfected by the likes of Lora Leigh and such, without anything new to add to the mix other than some convoluted mythology. This series started out pretty interesting, with promise of a intriguing story arc involving Weres, Unborns, and True Bloods, so it is quite disappointing for me to see the series devolve into tedious and unimaginative sex scenes stringed together by a thin story line in just four books. Sure, erotic paranormal romances are supposed to have sex scenes to the wazoo, but come on, consistent pacing and coherent story lines won’t hurt, surely?
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