Review: Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning

Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning 
Published: October 1st, 2006 (Gollancz)
Pages: 344
Age group: adult
Source: bought
Challenge: none
Series: Fever, #1
Buy the book: Bookdepository
Rating: ★★★☆☆


MacKayla Lane’s life is good. She has great friends, a decent job, and a car that breaks down only every other week or so. In other words, she’s your perfectly ordinary twenty-first-century woman.

Or so she thinks…until something extraordinary happens.

When her sister is murdered, leaving a single clue to her death–a cryptic message on Mac’s cell phone–Mac journeys to Ireland in search of answers. The quest to find her sister’s killer draws her into a shadowy realm where nothing is as it seems, where good and evil wear the same treacherously seductive mask. She is soon faced with an even greater challenge: staying alive long enough to learn how to handle a power she had no idea she possessed–a gift that allows her to see beyond the world of man, into the dangerous realm of the Fae..

As Mac delves deeper into the mystery of her sister’s death, her every move is shadowed by the dark, mysterious Jericho, a man with no past and only mockery for a future. As she begins to close in on the truth, the ruthless Vlane–an alpha Fae who makes sex an addiction for human women–closes in on her. And as the boundary between worlds begins to crumble, Mac’s true mission becomes clear: find the elusive Sinsar Dubh before someone else claims the all-powerful Dark Book–because whoever gets to it first holds nothing less than complete control of the very fabric of both worlds in their hands..

So.. This is a hard review for me to write. While I enjoyed reading it, and tore through it pretty quickly, it didn't really connect with me anywhere.

Mac is a nice enough character. She's a bit naive, going to Ireland to solve her sister's murder by herself because nobody can help her, and she rolls right into the problems. She's introduced to the world of Fae in record speed and soon she finds herself in the middle of finding an ancient book while she has to battle off the dark fae. One night she stumbles upon a bookstore owned by Jericho Barrons, and meets its owner. Cue the real start of the plot of this book.

I'm just going to put it out there: Jericho Barrons is an ass. I hate him. He's a poor excuse of a man and I can't stand him. He's bloody annoying in about three quarters of the book and if he was real, I'd have punched him in the face, tall as he might be. He's up there with Bill Compton from the Sookie Stackhouse books in terms of most-hated character.

Having said that, I liked that the story is told as if Mac tells the story afterwards. I liked her flashbacks, her pondering, her reflection on what had happened and I'm quite curious what comes next. I'd say I hope there is less Barrons in it, but I think that's wasted energy.

Darkfever set up nicely for the rest of the series, mapping out Dublin and creating a base for the storyline in the next books. I read the book fairly quickly, flipping the pages to find out more, and I'm sure that Moning will deliver that and more again in the sequel.