Nalini Singh
Hachette
Otago Daily Times, April 9th 2011
Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series is set in a world where humans coexist with vampires and angels in an uneasy peace; rogue vampires are tracked down by human guild hunters, who have a genetically inherited ability to trace them by their scent (in the same way that a skilled connoisseur can identify individual wines) and punished by the Archangel who rules the region.
Archangel’s Consort opens with Elena, a formerly human vampire hunter, starting a new life as an angel after being transformed at the end of the last book by her lover Raphael, (he Archangel of New York. Although she revels in her new-found immortality, as an angel Made rather than born, she is regarded with suspicion and contempt by many of Raphael’s people.
To make matters worse, an archangel of great power and malevolent madness, Raphael’s mother Calaine, is awakening from centuries of slumber, triggering storms, earthquakes, and outbreaks of bloodlust and rage in vampire and angel alike. And the focus of her attention is the rival for her son’s affection, Elena. Although the premise is an interesting one, the novel itself is basically Mills and Boon with vampires. Packed full of hot, angelic sex interspersed with bloody violence, it drips with lush, lurid, cliché-ridden prose.
Although this is the third in the series, I caught up on the back-story so easily from Elena’s flashbacks that they must surely be clunky to anybody who has read the other books. I gave up halfway through, after what plot there is was interrupted yet again by the heat of Elena and Raphael’s passion. There will be readers out there who love this book, but I am not one of them.
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