Prisoner of Night by J.R. Ward: review

3/5 stars on Goodreads

Prisoner of Night by J.R.Ward

Prisoner of Night is a shorter paranormal romance set in Black Dagger Brotherhood universe, with no familiar characters, though short is relative. It was about 180 pages instead of the usual 600. The story has a fairly straightforward premise: Ahmare tries to save her brother from a torture chamber of a sadistic vampire crime lord, and for that she needs to infiltrate the bunker of another sadistic vampire to fetch something. In this, she is helped by Duran. He’s the son of the latter sadistic vampire, and has spent the past twenty years being tortured by the first. And he has a revenge of his own to deliver.

Had the story been as simple as that, rescue and revenge, it would’ve been fairly good. It was action-filled; brutal in parts and heart-breaking at times. The stakes were constantly high, not least because Ahmare knows that she won’t get her brother free unless she returns Duran to his torturer. However, this was first and foremost a love-story, and that didn’t work for me at all.

The shorter form of the story required instant love between the characters, which is in part explained by the biological tendency of vampire males in BDB universe to bond with their chosen mate. But Duran has grown up in a cult, watching his father rape and abuse his mother, so what does he know about love? Yet he doesn’t seem to have any problems with emotions. Then, barely past adolescence, he’s spent twenty years in captivity, being tortured constantly. He should be a PTSD mess that takes centuries to heal. But apart from a freak-out in the beginning, and another at the end, he functions fairly rationally throughout. Ms Ward has written tortured characters before in her BDB books, guiding them through their healing processes in fairly believable manner, with more needed than a good woman’s love to make things right. Zadist especially is such a character and after several books, he’s still healing.

Here, however, there is no room for healing before the couple is already having sex. The scene was troublesome in many respects, but mostly because everything was forced on Duran by Ahmare, who acts as if his reluctance to seduce her is because he’s being gentlemanly, not because there might be an underlying cause for it—which then comes apparent at the climax of the scene. I’m not saying she abused him as such—though it came close—but the whole scene could’ve waited until Duran had recovered. That both of them expected to die on the mission didn’t really make the scene feel right.

For her part, Ahmare is depicted as a nurturing person forced into violence by circumstances, but she doesn’t really seem to suffer from the consequences of her actions, like beheading a person. She’s decisive when needs to be, and most of the time pushes the action on in her need to save her brother. And her nurturing nature doesn’t extend to Duran. All in all, the two made an odd pairing.

There were a couple of side characters who were also given their happy endings in the story. The most notable of these was Nexi, a Shadow who’s also fled the cult. A review mentioned how the scenes between her and Ahmare worked better emotionally than those with Duran, and suggested that they should’ve been made a pair in the end. At the very least, Ahmare should’ve shared the inner thoughts with him that she did with Nexi to make the connection between them more believable.

Duran gets to avenge his deaths in the end, and the epilogue paints a happily-ever-after he and Ahmare deserve. Nevertheless, the creepy parts of the story made me give only three stars of five to this story, probably to first ever that I’ve given to BDB series.

***

To recover, I read a twenty-page short story by Karen Chance that was free on her website with many other stories. If you’re a fan of her Cassandra Palmer and Dorina Basarab urban fantasy books, check them out. Updating Pritkin was a funny little story about trying to make everyone’s favourite war mage less scruffy, with pictures. The ending was a lesson to all and a win for Pritkin. However, as the story had barely any Pritkin in it—the scenes where he should’ve appeared were omitted, like so annoyingly in the books too—I only gave it three stars out of five. But it made me happy. And I’m definitely looking forward to Siren’s Song, which should be in his point of view completely.

Updating Pritkin by Karen Chance