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Dark Possession

Christine Feehan

Published 2007        358 pages

Summary (from the book jacket)

Manolito De La Cruz discovers his lifemate only to hear she would never accept a male of the species.

Mary Ann Delaney has been around the Carpathians for a little while now, and having met several of the men, she knows she would have a difficult time being a lifemate to any of them. She's a counsellor for women and she wants to go back to her home turf.

Manolito was born and bred in the Carpathian mountains, but has lived in South America with his four brothers on their extensive cattle ranch. They are laws unto themselves, and have long ago taken on possessive, passionate and arrogant ways that only magnify the already dominant traits of their race.

Mary Ann, modern city girl, is about to meet a rainforest predator.

The Review

If you haven’t read any of Christine Feehan’s Dark series (where have you been hiding for the last few years?!) you may find this introduction to the Dark series helpful in explaining the background of the Carpathians, otherwise I’m going to assume you know what I’m talking about….

Dark Possession is the eighteenth book in Christine Feehan’s Dark series.  Every book in this series is a stand alone story following the romance between a Carpathian male who has been desperately waiting for his lifemate and the (usually) human woman who gets the shock of her life when the he finds her and bonds with her on the spot.  You don’t have to read them in order, but I think it helps if you do.  Not least because characters from earlier novels crop up again in later novels and they refer to past events which can be a bit confusing. 

As a case in point, Manolito and MaryAnn first met in Dark Celebration where he marked her as his lifemate – I didn’t read this book (my bad) and by the end of Dark Possession I still have no idea what happen when they first met in Dark Celebration.  Neither of the characters ever says, “Hey, I think I know what might have happened when we first met!” and as the characters themselves can’t even form a hypothesis of what happened, the reader is certainly none the wiser.  Do I have to read Dark Celebration if I want to find out?

Maybe it’s because the Dark series has been running for years that I feel I’ve read it all before?  Maybe it’s because after reading eighteen books with essentially the same premise, I have read it all before!  Either way I can’t work up the same enthusiasm for Dark Possession as I could for Dark Prince or Dark Desire (I think I read those books about 5 times each.) 

Dark Possession isn’t a bad book.  The scenes where MaryAnn holds off the vampire, jaguar men and evil mages are exciting and whilst reading those parts of the book I didn’t want to put the book down.  But even these parts of the book ended up fragmented when in the middle of fending off a vampire attack Manolito or MaryAnn would spend a couple of pages thinking about how wonderful, attractive etc. their lifemate is.  Come on – vampire attack! Wouldn’t that focus your mind on something other than how bodacious your partner is?

I think that if you like the Dark series you will love Dark Possession but if, like me, you haven’t been enthused by the Dark series lately there is still nothing new here to make you change your mind.  I feel mean now because every time I try to say that this book isn’t bad I just make it sound worse, which really isn’t what I intended!  I’m going to stop writing now before I dig myself into an even deeper hole.

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