Dark Hope

Once again, Christing Feehan brings danger, suspense, romance, and action to her latest book in the Dark paranormal romantic suspense series. A war with evil is coming and Silke Vriese Reinders has trained for this moment her entire life. She knows the only way to win is with the help of the Carpathians, and that she is fated to be the life-mate of an ancient supernatural Carpathian warrior.

Benedek Kovak, one of the oldest and most dangerous Carpathians, is on his way to Silke’s village of Nachtbloem in the Netherlands. With the impending danger, he and four other ancients have started their journey to find his life-mate and join her in battle. Can she fight back the darkness that is threatening to overpower him? Can they defeat the enemy and find their happily ever after?

Silke and Benedek are attracted to each other. Besides training her whole life to fight evil, Silke is a tarot card reader, a gardener, and a healer. She loves her life and her adoptive mother Fenja and her friend Tora, who is a Carpathian guarding a gate. She’s tenacious, considerate of others, intelligent, decisive, and values courage and duty. Benedek is unsure he can be saved from the darkness. He trusts few people and has a deep distrust of most. He’s patient, dangerous, matter-of-fact, and values loyalty and intellect above other traits. The secondary characters provided balance, opportunities for humor, support, and conflict. I hope some of them have their own story in future books in the series.

The novel is set in contemporary times and mainly in the Netherlands. The author does a great job of characterization, world-building and building atmosphere. Readers can easily feel themselves transported to the small village. The story has a few subplots that add to the high stakes and increase the risk.

The significant amount of danger and action, as well as the romance, kept me fully engaged and made this a true page turner for me. It’s a riveting story with protagonists that I liked and cheered on as they navigated their relationship and prepared for and fought evil. It contains the elements that I love in this genre of books. The book delivers on escapism through attraction, friendship, family, found family, romance, action, and love while also tackling serious issues including trust, respect, communication, betrayal, stressful situations, duty, loyalty, battling evil, and selfless sacrifice for others.

Overall, it was suspenseful, full of danger, and action-packed. The subplots tied together well, the main characters were strong and the ending was satisfactory, but also set up possibilities for future books. If you enjoy thrilling paranormal romantic suspense novels with strong male and female lead characters, then I recommend you check out this series.

Berkley Publishing Group and Christine Feehan provided a complimentary digital ARC of this novel via NetGalley. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. The publication date is currently set for January 07, 2025.