Review: Rising Darkness by Thea Harrison (A Game of Shadows #1)

Rising Darkness (A Game of Shadows #1)
Thea Harrison
Published: April 2, 2013 (Berkley)
Purchase at: Book Depository or Amazon

Reviewed by: Mary

Rating (out of 5): 4 stars

Fans of Thea Harrison’s Elder Races will be both disappointed in this book and excited by it.  Rising Darkness is nothing like her Elder Races series and does not take place in the same world.  However, it is a mind-bending, head-scratching, really great read.

The story starts with Mary, an emergency room doctor, who after a very trying 26-hour shift, begins to think she might be going insane.  She has had strange dreams for as long as she can remember, but is now hearing voices and experiencing some intense paranoia.  At first she blames her obvious fatigue, but even her ex is concerned enough to insist she go to a doctor.  In her effort to avoid the doctor’s appointment, she takes a day trip, and just misses being home when her house is burned down.  It all goes downhill from there.

Mass shootings, near abductions, and a scene involving hawks (yes, hawks) that could have come straight from a Hitchcock film are nothing compared to the mysterious stranger, Michael, who shows up to help her.  He makes it very clear, however, that he will kill her himself if she can’t be salvaged.  She comes to realize that she is a part of something much larger than herself and that her strange dreams are memories of past lives, some of which she spent with Michael.  In one of those lives, she also took an injury to her psyche that is still bleeding 900 years later.

Michael’s goal is to keep her alive long enough to get her to Astra, the only other one of their kind left.  When the three of them are all together, Astra can heal Mary and they can finally destroy the big bad who they have been hunting for 6,000 years.  Time is not on their side, since he is hunting them as well and has some pretty neat tricks up his anciently evil sleeves.

Slowly, very slowly, which is why this book got a 4-star rating instead of a 5, Mary figures out who she is and her purpose.  I have been purposefully vague because even at the end of the book she is still making discoveries about her abilities and her relationship with Michael.

Overall, this feels like a good start to new series by an author who is pretty trustworthy when it comes to delivering consistently good books.

Sexual content: Graphic sex (They haven’t seen each other for 900 years!)