The Darkest Day by Britt BuryThe Darkest Day by Britt Bury
Series: Immortal Heat #1
Published by Forever Romance, Grand Central Publishing on July 3, 2012
Genres: PNR
Format: eBook
Source: Advance Reader Copy, NetGalley
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three-stars

ALL-CONSUMING DESIRE . . .

Izel Campbell was raised to believe she is an immortal Fionn with the magical skills of persuasion. But when she travels to Scotland to visit her ancestral home, Izel discovers that she is actually the world's last living human. Forced to run for her life, Izel crosses paths with Kelvin Kerr, the Campbells' greatest foe-and the most magnificent warrior she has ever seen.

BURNS BRIGHTEST . . .

A thousand-year-old battle chief of the Kerr clan, Kelvin lives only to avenge his father, who died at the hands of the bloody Campbells. Honor demands he kill the Campbell heir, but when he learns that the lovely Izel is both Campbell and human, Kelvin is torn between duty and desire . . .

A couple years ago, several friends recommended this book to me. The back of the book makes it sound like something I’d love! So I downloaded it, but before I read it, another friend told me she thought it read a lot like one of my books. That sort of turned me off, but it still sounded really good. So a couple years later, here I am.

I will say, it reads a lot more like Kresley Cole than it does Laura Hunsaker. In fact, many many reviews mention the similarities. But the book has enough differences that it can stand on its own. Mostly. Someone described it as IAD lite. I’d agree with that.

There is very little world-building, which kind of stinks because it’s an interesting world. Humans are extinct, or at least very close to, and it’s only immortals who remain. We are seeing the Campbell clan and the Kerr clans mainly in this. There is a glossary at the end, I’d suggest reading it before you start.

Kelvin Kerr is a Pookah-he’s a razorback pookah…I guess there’s different types in this book, Razorback, Wolverine, and Bear. I always thought pookahs were mystical horses who lured people to their deaths in the waves of the ocean, but hey, PNR needs something fresh, and this was a neat direction to go.

Now this is where I began to have trouble with the book. Kelvin is very much like Kresley Cole’s Lykaes. There’s even a sentence in there that felt the same. “I know my female’s tone,” is straight from Bowen and Mariketa, and in the same kind of situation, Kelvin says, “I’m beginning to recognize that tone.” BUT with that being said, that’s not really what I had trouble with. He’s not honorable. I really had a hard time liking him.

Kelvin is an asshat. he’s not just pushy, he’s mean to her. And he’s been killing innocent people for centuries. He may be weary of it, but he still does it for his ‘revenge.’ When it’s been several centuries, it’s ok to stop. You got the guys who killed your father, isn’t that enough? He and his brother spend centuries exterminating the Campbell line. Izel comes along, he knows she’s his female, and he still plans on killing her for no other reason than she’s a Campbell. It seems too contrived, and seriously, he’s going to kill a woman, the last human on earth, a woman he’s admitted is his only chance at happiness and is innocent of everything, for a vengeance sworn centuries ago. It’s too much. and he realizes this too, but not til the end, because priorities.

Izel has come to Scotland to meet up with her grandfather. She is blonde, and thin, and pretty. But she has no emotions. She has never had any emotions, ever. And as she walks into her grandfather’s cabin, she sees Kelvin  (who is there to kill her) and she is both hit with emotions, and then her body and face change. She’s dark-haired, olive-skinned, and curvacious now. I hate how she changed in appearance. No emotion, drab appearance, gets emotions, bam is a knockout! It was unnecessary.

But, it turns out she is also full-human. Her mother was an Incan queen with a lot of power, and Izel is rumored to have inherited power from all three castes of her clan. She is just a Poet, but her words have no power yet, but they will…

I could look over the eye-rolling similarities to IAD, but this was too much. Who wants a hero who kills innocents? The only reason he doesn’t kill Izel is because she’s his one fated mate. Not because he thinks it’s wrong, not because she’s innocent, not because she has nothing to do with his sworn vengeance and feud. Because killing her will make him lose his one chance at happiness.

Now, I do get that he’s so old, and immortals can hold long grudges, but it didn’t seem as if there was any honor in killing off the entire Campbell clan to fulfill a vengeance sworn on a battlefield hundreds of years ago.  I think that my feelings on this book are mixed. I really enjoyed the writer’s style. There are many authors who have that fun and sassy voice like Cole does, so I don’t think she plagiarized anything. But I don’t know why her editors didn’t have her just pull out the too-similar parts and run with it! This story has so much going for it! I may not have liked Kelvin, but the story itself and Izel and the whole living without emotions had a great set-up for the series! I would read her again, if only to see where she goes with it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like book two every happened. Her website hasn’t been updated since 2012, her twitter has the last tweet as 2012 as well, she was writing more books, but nothing ever came of this series. I see very VERY few bad reviews, so I really don’t know what happened. She hasn’t answered my email, I’ll update if she does.

***ARC courtesy of Forever Yours

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three-stars