Sandy M’s review of Earl of Darkness by Alix Rickloff
Historical Paranormal Romance published by Pocket 28 Dec 10
When I first started reading this book, I was quite taken. It starts out different and intriguing. But something happens along the way.
I like the lead characters. Cat is of noble blood but has been outcast, so she’s doing what she has to to survive. Aidan is a nobleman, an earl, and he’s tortured by the loss of his family, especially the death of his father, and he’s determined to find out what actually happened to his sire. To do that he has to have his father’s diary translated. Both he and Cat are Other, a mix of human and Fey. They each have their own powers. Cat’s is the ability to read languages. So when Aidan catches her red-handed stealing said book, he forces her to translate it for him in lieu of sending her off to prison. This concept works for me and I like the first number of chapters that set the stage for it all. After that, things just get too convoluted and a tad too complicated, and I found myself getting easily distracted.
Aidan’s cousin is introduced. There’s a couple of villains, one plain evil and one you feel for on occasion. Bad guys hired by the villains come and go. Eventually a madman and his lady friend are introduced. And, of course, with all of these introductions the plot gets thicker and thicker, we’re introduced to characters who are no longer, and through it all Aidan takes the brunt of the evil needed to combat evil while he’s also fighting Cat and his attraction to her. Cat just wants out initially, but after what she discovers in the diary she later wants to help Aidan, even as she becomes attracted to him too. All of this is in between the new characters that pop up and I just lost interest the more it went on and on. Especially when one character has had the answers all along and we go through a long drawn-out dance with that person before those answers are spit out out of the blue. I feel like I wasted a heck of a lot of time after that revelation.
Another drawback for me are all the incomplete sentences Ms. Rickloff uses in her writing. Sometimes those work and sometimes they don’t. Because there’s so many used in this book, they don’t work most of the time. I found myself having to re-read too paragraphs just to sort those sentences out. I think if they’d been used for one character’s point of view it might have worked better, but it’s throughout the entire book and just gets to be too much. It doesn’t enhance anything when it’s so overused. Other than that, the writing is sufficiently dark to bring out the same in the storyline.
The interaction between Aidan and Cat also suffers from all of these issues. I wanted more time with them together instead of fighting that much evil and each other. There’s plenty of evil, so a little more romance would have balanced it all out. Even when they acknowledge their feelings, they still go at one another and I just got fed up at that point.
With these issues cropping up, I started skimming here and there about three-quarters of the way through. For such a good start to the book, it’s disappointing how it just didn’t keep that consistency to the end.
Grade: C-
Summary:
The magic she tries to hide…
Born a lady, but reduced to surviving in the slums of Dublin, Catriona O’Connell has been hired to steal a mysterious book from Aidan Douglas, Earl of Kilronan. But Cat is secretly Other, an age-old mixture of Fey and human—something Aidan recognizes immediately when he surprises the lovely young burglar in his library, about to steal a magical diary.
…is the magic he desperately wants.
From the moment Aidan sees her, Cat’s spirited beauty enchants him, but her uncanny abilities are what he truly needs, for Cat can understand the mystical language in the diary he inherited from his murdered father. So Aidan makes an offer: translate the book or be thrown in prison as a thief. And as Cat slowly deciphers each page, she and Aidan are drawn together by passion . . .and into the violence of the Other world that is the Kilronan legacy. Can they defeat those who seek the book, or are their lives in even greater danger than their hearts?
Read an excerpt.
