Dark Slayer by Christine Feehan

I'd given up reading anything new in Christine Feehan's Carpathian series because they were getting so repetitive. The same ritual words. The same characters. The same plots. It was almost as if they were written on autopilot. Fortunately, Dark Slayer takes a significant step towards changing the tenor of the series, as well as providing a welcome respite from super Alpha males and their binding words.

Ms. Feehan surprised the heck out of me with this one. Not only was the main character far, far (FAR) different from her predecessors, she was someone who was strong without being bitchy. And that takes some serious skill to pull off in this type of book.

I'd like to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the book. But truthfully, I only enjoyed about  3/4 of it. The last 1/4 honestly seemed as if the author was struggling to get her page count. She rehashed the same emotions, reactions, mental wanderings so often I had a combined case of whiplash and deja vu. I'm sitting there with a book I was enjoying-- yelling at it. "I get it! Enough already!"  Bad sign for a happy reader. While this book didn't repeat the themes, characters, dialogue, settings etc etc of the rest of the series, it began to seriously repeat ITSELF.

I don't want to go into too much detail, because much of the charm of the book lies in the differences between this book and the rest in the series. Her fans should love this. It's worth reading just to gain the plot points for the next installment, but it could have been so much better.