Review: Sin’s Dark Caress by Tracey O’Hara

Sin’s Dark Caress by Tracey O’Hara
HarperCollins/AVON (July 31, 2012)
Mass Market: $7.99; ebook: $7.99
ISBN: 9780061783159

Favorite Lines: “Bianca followed him back to the body and dropped to a squat. Dark blond hair was tacky with drying blood that pooled around the dead girl’s head, and her lower abdomen was just an empty cavity.” (p. 6, egalley)

An ancient darkness has risen from the ashes . . . and terror has been loosed upon an unsuspecting world.

Forensic witch Bianca Sin has never seen anything like it: homeless teenage girls torn to pieces by dark magic in the cold shadows of the city. More terrifying still is the symbol written in blood on an alley wall—the unmistakable seal of the Dark Brethren.

Teaming up with NYPD homicide detective Lancelot McManus and an elite task force headed by the shapeshifter Oberon DuPrie, Bianca knows her worst fears have finally come to pass. A new war of annihilation is looming that will plunge the worlds of vampire, shapeshifter, and human into chaos—and two adversarial tribes locked in uneasy truce will need to take up arms together to save the children. Trust will be essential for Sin and McManus, as the hunt forces them to confront their deepest terrors.

For the ultimate evil is no longer approaching.

It’s here.

Tracey O’Hara’s Dark Brethren series gets better with each book. I didn’t fall in love with book one, Night’s Cold Kiss. It was okay, but I didn’t really think about it after I read it. Book two, Death’s Sweet Embrace, felt like a totally different series. I read it quickly, connected with some parts of the story and was entertained by the mystery. Sin’s Dark Caress is even better because it brings something I love. It is dark. Not horror dark, but heavier than the average romance. Evil permeates its pages, but it never lets you forget you are reading a romance. You may want to read the first two books in the series before jumping into Sin’s Dark Caress.

Characters: Almost all the characters are intentionally or unintentionally hiding something. Some don’t know–on a molecular level–who they are. Others are transitioning. Change is not always good and there is plenty of change happening in book three of the Dark Brethren series.

We met vampires and animalians (shifters) in the first two books. In Sin’s Dark Caress we get to know witches and the fae. Other paranormals are still around, but the focus of the book is witches. We also get to see the birth of a battle between good and evil.

Sin’s Dark Caress feels like the start of a new chapter for the series. The first two books had things in common, but for the most part they brought up a “case,” solved it and ended with a couple finding love. At the end of book three, I feel like future books will consistently get darker as the characters attack a worse and worse evil. I also expect to learn more about a couple of mobsters that intrigued me in Sin’s Dark Caress.