Review: Demon’s Curse by Alexa Egan (Imnada Brotherhood #1)

Demon’s Curse (Imnada Brotherhood #1)
Alexa Egan
Published: Dec. 26, 2012 (Pocket Books)
Purchase: Book Depository or Amazon
Review source: copy provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review

Reviewed by: Amy

Rating (out of 5): 3 stars

For going on centuries the Imnada, a race of shape-changers, have been long thought extinct. Though not really extinct, the Imnada prefer to keep up the misconception in order to avoid conflict with their Fae-blood enemies, as well as just keeping themselves a secret from the population in general.

When threatened with exposure, four men, including one Captain Mac Flannery, are at the core of squashing this threat before it gets out of hand. When it becomes apparent that a Fae-blood is at the center of the problem the men, narrowly escaping with their lives, have a curse placed upon them. Regardless of their efforts, the Imnada clans exile the men due to the curse.

A little over a year later, when one of the four men is found murdered, Mac believes the threat to the Imnada is back. The only lead he has to go on is that from his murdered friend’s supposed lover, stage actress, Bianca Parrino. As the two work together to discover the what and why of the murder, hope blooms for Mac when he finds his friend may have been working on a way to get out from under the curse’s thrall. He’ll just have to stay alive long enough to figure it out.

If the shapeshifter is your supernatural creature of choice, Alexa Egan has certainly presented a very interesting and fresh mythology. The idea that the Imnada hearken back to the times of King Arthur, and the way they are intrinsically linked with the Fae is really interesting. I look forward to understanding this set-up more with future books in this series.

The focus of the book was a bit off for me. I love the idea of the past coming back to haunt you. Really that theme runs rampant throughout the story. I just really couldn’t get on board with the whole curse scenario because I felt like the specifics of it were rather vague. Add to the fact that I felt Mac’s loyalties towards the Imnada—who essentially threw Mac and his friends over due to said curse—were displaced, his reminisces about the “good old days” of living with the clans just didn’t resonate well with me.

Mac’s wanting to get back to the Imnada puts kind of a damper on the romance as well. He sees his attraction and any subsequent relationship with Bianca as temporary. Since she’s human there’s no way she would be accepted in the Imnada once he’s able to return to the clans—another check in the negative column for the Imnada in my opinion. I liked Bianca a great deal as a heroine. She’s had to overcome some seriously dark things in her past, and I like that she’s made such a name for herself as an actress, and is so independent. Therefore, by the end, things between them still felt a bit inauthentic.

The saving grace of this book was the mythology and enough interest in the remainder of Mac’s friends/secondary characters that I’m willing to give the next book a try. Not everyone shares Mac’s blind faith in the Imnada and it seems as though their time of hiding is coming to an end.

Sexual content: Sex