Night Lost - Lynn Viehl

Another one in Viehl's Darkyn series. I had some trouble grading this book as I devoured the parts about Richard and Alex but wasn't really interested in the parts about Gabriel and Nick.

A NOBLE PRISONER...

Gabriel Seran has fallen into the hands of the fanatical religious order known as the Brethren. Though abandoned by his fellow Kyn, he remains honor bound to protect their secrets from his interrogators. Blinded, nailed to a cross, and sealed in a chapel cellar beneath a ruined château, Gabriel faces an eternity of suffering.

AN OBSESSED THIEF...

Nicola "Nick" Jefferson has been traveling across Europe, looting churches of their precious artwork and fencing the treasures to make her living. At each destination, she liberates the captive vampires, hoping they'll provide her with information leading to the one artifact she so desperately craves: the Golden Madonna.

A FATEFUL COUPLING...

Gabriel and Nick have met before in each other's dreams. Bound together more than coincidence, their destinies intertwine even as their passions ignite...

At the end of the last book of the series Richard, the High King of the Darkyn, kidnaps Alex, Michael Cyprien's Sygkenis. Alex is a reputed doctor who has already found some answers regarding the Darkyn's race and Richard has a medical condition that he wants her to treat. His body is suffering a mutation into an animal species that will eventually kill him.

I must confess that I have been curious about Richard and his problems for sometime now. He has been a secondary character in the earlier books, always surrounded with an aura of mystery and power and that makes him really attractive from this reader's point of view. I keep wishing Viehl would write a book about him but it doesn't seem to be happening soon.

So as I've been really curious about him, and because Alex usually steals the show even when she is only a secondary character, I paid much more attention to them than to Gabriel and Nick. These two never really interested me, we already had a book about a badly tortured Darkyn with Thierry Durand and Nick seemed more interested in abandoning him than preparing a future with him. I'm not sure where Viehl is leading us or if she is setting up things for future books but she does spend a long time with characters and events other than the main couple for which I was really grateful. Viehl ends up joining the two stories and surprised me with an interesting twist. However I felt the book was very uneven, very good with the High King's story and not so good with the rest...

Grade: B-