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Darkness follows Lieutenant Morrisey James.
As an Atlanta PD detective, Morrisey understands the worst atrocities the city has to offer—or believes he does. His recent cases present something new: a killer who unleashes unbridled terror in victims before moving in for the kill. Morrisey has an edge, though, the terrifying ability to gain flashes of insight from each victim.
Most people assume Farren Austin is a shallow, pretty boy, but he’s so much more. Agent Austin keeps secrets as part of the FBI’s Alternate Entities Task Force, a unit created to monitor travelers from another realm. Although they might look human, they’re anything but.
And they’ve taken a special interest in Morrisey.
Partnered with Farren, Morrisey finds himself in the middle of demons trying to possess his body, a succubus sidekick who wants to cook him breakfast, accusations of being a powerful destructive force, and a growing number of people calling him “Darkness.” Not to mention a sudden overwhelming attraction to his new partner.
It’s going to take the mysterious Farren’s help to keep the latest case from being Morrisey’s last.
Rating: B
Eden Winters’ Darkness is an inventive and intriguing mixture of police procedural and urban fantasy with a dash of sci-fi and a touch of romance, and is quite unlike anything else I’ve read recently. The worldbuilding is excellent, but the pacing is uneven; I liked that the author takes time to set up the story and characters, but the downside to that is that the second-half feels rushed and the ending abrupt, and while I liked the two leads as a couple, their romance takes a bit of a back seat to everything else that is going on. Darkness is fascinating and utterly compelling in parts, but it does suffer from information overload at times, and I couldn’t help thinking it might have worked better as two shorter instalments of a duology rather than one longer-than-average (for a romance) novel with such a lot going on.
When the story begins, Detective Morrisey James and his partner, Will Murphy, are called to the scene of several brutal murders. He’s seen a lot of truly awful things in his time as a detective, but this… this has to be one of the worst. The past few months have seen a huge increase in the number of murders and other serious crime in the Atlanta area for no reason anyone can determine, and he’s drinking himself to sleep most nights just to be able to keep the nightmares at bay. Once finished at the scene, Morrisey and a clearly distraught Will return to the precinct; Morrisey exits the car and tells Will to go home to his family before heading into the building – and turns too late to prevent his partner from blowing his brains out.
Morrisey’s life hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses. He’s always been something of a loner and has never felt as though he really fit in anywhere; his adoptive parents died when he was young and he has no other family, his one serious relationship ended tragically and now, aged forty-two, he mostly sees life through the bottom of a bottle. Will’s suicide sends him spiraling further and even wondering how much more loss he can stand before he goes out the same way.
You can read the rest of this review at All About Romance.
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