Beautiful Danger by Michele Hauf
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have to remind myself this is a Harlequin book and they don’t allow a lot of time for character development. I always feel like there’s something missing from these relatively short stories, but the shortness makes for fast and efficient action. BEAUTIFUL DANGER had two interesting protagonists, both with very good motivations to hate the other. Our lady hero Lark’s husband was tortured and killed by vampires, so she joins a secret society to wipe them out. She’s the only woman in the society, and as such is faced with discrimination from the leaders and other hunters. But then she gets handed a job to stake our male hero, Domingos, a vampire gone crazy from torture by werewolves. He figures that Lark has been sent by the wolves to kill him, and even though he’s been driven insane by the torture, he doesn’t want to die…
With such tragic backstories, it’s hard to see how the two could fall for each other. But there’s actually some good, twisty writing that brings them together, each saving the other. The sex scenes are standard Harlequin, pretty hot but sort of displaced from the action of the book. The fact that Domingos had to have his house very dark due to his UV torture gave the romance a nice exotic touch. I liked the Paris setting; I went there on a high school trip so I had some idea of what the streets looked like as the main characters walked around. The secret society also has promise: the leader apparently has a few centuries under his belt, so that leaves questions for future books of this series. I had the ending surprise figured out, but it’s a HEA, so I’m not disappointed. It was interesting to see things from the point of view of someone who has psychological problems, and the thread of music whispering through the story is welcome.
Received as a free digital ARC via Netgalley and the publisher.
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