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Embrace The Night

Karen Chance

Published 2008          378 pages

Summary (from the book jacket)

Recently named the world's chief clairvoyant, Cassandra Palmer still has a thorn in her side. As long as Cassie and a certain master vampire - the dangerously sexy Mircea - are magically bound to each other, her life will never be her own…

The spell that binds them can only be broken with an incantation found in an ancient text, the Codex Merlini. The Codex's location has been lost in the present day, so Cassie will have to seek it out in the only place it can still be found - the past.

But Cassie soon realizes the Codex has been lost for a reason. The book is rumoured to contain dangerous spells, and retrieving it may help Cassie to deal with Mircea, but it could also endanger the world…

The Review

Embrace The Night is Karen Chance’s third novel featuring Cassie Palmer, a young woman who has unexpectedly inherited the mystical position of Pythia giving her clairvoyant powers and the ability to travel through time.  While there is a brief recap of past events worked into the first few chapters of this book to help remind readers of the story so far, if you haven’t read any of this series before I wouldn’t recommend starting here.  The convoluted time travel storylines make reading these novels in order a must.

Even then, once you have read the previous two books in this series, Embrace The Night is still confusing and difficult to follow in places.  I really wanted to enjoy this book but the constant plot twists and irrelevant sub-plots (made doubly complicated by Cassie frequently time travelling across her own past) made keeping up with the story very hard work.  Fast pacing is usually a good thing in any novel but somehow I got left behind while story raced along without me at a frantic pace.

Plot line confusion aside, the author has created some great characters in Cassie and the war mage Pritkin and she develops them both further in this book.  Pritkin suddenly becomes a lot more interesting as his family history and past is revealed.  He and Cassie still have their antagonistic relationship but due to a liberal sprinkling of snappy dialogue the pair come across as more endearingly funny than annoyingly argumentative.

There are still enough vampire characters in Embrace The Night to satisfy even the most demanding vampire fan, with Mircea (Count Dracula’s brother) having a large role in this story as he helps Cassie look for the Codex Merlini.  The Codex holds the counter-spell to the binding spell that currently binds Mircea and Cassie together.  Neither Mircea nor Cassie wish for the binding spell to be completed because it is unclear as to which of them would become master and which one would become slave in their relationship - but avoiding the spell’s completion is painful and dangerous to both of them.

There are a lot of great ideas and interesting characters in Embrace The Night and when they are combined with dangerous sexy vampires it should be a wining formula.  Unfortunately the convoluted plot lost me somewhere before the middle of the book and I never really caught up with it again but I suspect that not all readers will suffer from this problem.  If you are already a fan of this series you will probably enjoy this book but if you aren’t already a fan of the Cassie Palmer series I don’t see this novel converting you.

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