Fin­ished Plea­sure of a Dark Prince by Kres­ley Cole. This is the lat­est book in her Immor­tals After Dark para­nor­mal romance series.

In this one, Lucia the Huntress is a Valkyrie who’s known for her skill with a bow — and the ago­niz­ing pain that she expe­ri­ences when­ever she misses a shot. She also hap­pens to be the mate of Gar­reth MacRieve, a Lykae prince (think were­wolf). Gar­reth relent­lessly pur­sues Lucia, who runs from him for a year before the two of them find them­selves on a rat­tle­trap boat headed deep into the Ama­zon. Gar­reth is happy that he’s finally caught up with Lucia and sets about seduc­ing her. Lucia finds her­self attracted to Gar­reth as well, but two big obsta­cles stand in the way of their hap­pi­ness – Lucia’s vow of chastity and her mis­sion to kill an evil god …

I like Cole’s Immor­tals After Dark series because it fea­tures magic, action, and mem­o­rable char­ac­ters all tied together in a fun, sexy way. Her books are just enter­tain­ing reads, and Plea­sure of a Dark Prince was no exception.

I liked Gar­reth a lot, espe­cially how he woos Lucia with every­thing from a but­ter­fly to a quiver that never runs out of arrows while they’re on board the boat (that quiver comes in real handy later on in the story, which I thought was a nice touch). I did get a lit­tle tired of Gar­reth think­ing that he knew what was best for Lucia, that she wasn’t capa­ble of han­dling dan­ger, and his being ready to kill every guy who merely looked at her. But then again, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the alpha male char­ac­ter. The heroes in the IAD series are all seri­ously alpha, but the women are strong enough to han­dle them, so it usu­ally evens out okay for me.

Lucia was also an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. She was strong and capa­ble but also still had some very real fears and hangups. Cole is really good at achiev­ing that kind of bal­ance with her female characters.

Another thing that I liked is that Cole rewound time a lit­tle bit and showed some behind-the-scenes action with Gar­reth and Lucia that was only hinted at in other IAD books. I thought it was inter­est­ing to see these events again from two dif­fer­ent points of view. It’s a tricky sto­ry­telling device to pull off, though, and I did think that the action dragged a lit­tle bit at the begin­ning of the book, if only because I already knew how some things turned out from hav­ing read the pre­vi­ous books in the series.

This isn’t my favorite IAD book (I still like Bowen and Mari’s story the best), but it’s another solid addi­tion to the series, and I’m already look­ing for­ward to the next book, Demon from the Dark, which comes out later this year. Thumbs up.

A mild spoiler: There is a doozy of an epi­logue at the end of this book, which sets up what I’ve heard is going to be a tril­ogy of IAD books. I hope so!

Up next: Just One of the Guys by Kris­tan Higgins.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.

What about you guys? Any­one read­ing any­thing good right now? Share in the comments.