Review: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

I’ll admit, I am a Kresley Cole fan-girl. But I have a very good reason for that: her books are simply the best in the Paranormal Romance genre.  And this latest installment in the Immortals After Dark series features Regin the Radiant, one of the raucous Val-Hall Valkyrie we’ve grown to know and love.  Hundreds of years ago, she fell in love with a Berserker warrior named Aidan and they planned to marry. But he was killed by a vampire before he could realize his plans to become immortal.  Now his love for Regin prompts him to reincarnate over and over.  But each time, as he remembers their love, he is killed more brutally than the time before.

In this incarnation, he is Declan Chase… a man who has devoted his life to the destruction of Lorekind.  He is running an island facility that tests and tortures members of each species, hoping to exploit their weaknesses and harness their strengths to use against them.  This is the same camp where Carrow was taken in Demon from the Dark.  Of course, Regin is one of those abducted.  Declan doesn’t remember her, but he feels a pull towards her that he can’t explain.  He’s lived a tortured life and has good reason to hate the Lore, but despite that, and despite the drugs he takes to suppress his berserker strength, he can’t ignore the attraction.  At the same time, Regin struggles with a terrible choice: sacrifice herself or help Declan remember his life as Aidan and hasten the death of the only man she has ever loved.

As always, Cole fleshes out her characters so much that I can’t help but care for them deeply.  And each book is a symphony of sexual tension and payoff.  She always finds such a great balance between the love and the sex. 

Just like the group of books that take place simultaneously surrounding the Hie, we see the storyline converge from this book  in the same time frame as Lucia’s and Carrow’s before it. We’re also seeing the set-up for the next book in the series, which can’t come soon enough in my opinion.  And that is Lothaire’s story. (I’m also dying to get Lanthe’s story… which is a suprise, considering how much I hated Sabine.)
 
It can't be ignored that Declan is not the best hero. He does some pretty crappy stuff and it's hard to forgive him for it.  His issues are also pretty substantial and he is what keeps this one from rating as high for me as some of Cole's other books. I kind of wish that the hero would have been Aidan instead. 4 stars.