Other Feehan Series

More on Christine Feehan

The Carpathian series continues with Dark Challenge and Julian, Aidan’s twin, who is sent to protect Desari, a singer targeted by a human ring of vampire hunters because of her haunting voice and the fact that she and her band are never seen during the day. He goes to a concert and instantly sees in colors and is inundated by feelings that have been lost to him for centuries.

Julian soon learns that Desari, her brother, Darius, and the band are also Carpathians, also centuries old—a first for the female lifemate in the books—and a group unknown to the other Carpathians. They had escaped from an attack on their people as children, raised by Darius, only six at the time, all the rest younger, and knew little about lifemates or other realities about their species. Desari and another female, Syndil, have powers not shown by female Carpathians in other books who were all what Feehan calls fledglings—very young and inexperienced, their gifts not yet developed.

Syndil can heal the earth after fires or other natural disasters. Desari’s voice can weave a spell around friend or foe and hold them in place or call them to do her bidding. In previous books, the only real power the females had was to pull their lifemates from darkness and help them keep to the honor code of their race. It was nice to see the women as more capable than just to be helpmates.

Dark Fire is Darius’s story but continues with the band and his family, which now includes Julian. Darius finds his lifemate, a human woman with a psychic link to animals. Unlike previous human women converted unintentionally or accidentally, Tempest willingly agrees to conversion to keep Darius strong and safe. He had decided to grow old and die with her. Only parts I didn’t like were when Tempest made stupid decisions used to deepen or continue the conflict and tension of the plot. I think it would be so much more suspenseful if—usually the heroine—did the smart thing and still wound up being dragged into the conflict.

Other Series

Christine Feehan is a prolific writer and has a wonderful imagination although her characters tend to have the same physical and personality characteristics—the males all dominant, demanding, and bossy, the females accommodating out of love but also smart and willful when necessary. She has a series about people who are also leopards, a new one about shadow riders, people who can enter shadows, be invisible to others, and travel long distances quickly.

These stories also center on the males having a difficult time finding compatible mates but have the more typical plot of an obstacle, an enemy, having to be resolved—stopped or destroyed—before they can safely become a family. Out of all of them, I prefer the Carpathian series for its imagination and intricate world.

I’ve only read one book in another series with bound usually in the title. Bound Together is about the oldest brother of a large group of brothers who is undercover in a motorcycle gang to stop a human trafficking ring. I guess it’s also about a group of sisters, some married to the brothers, who have various powers in controlling the elements. These are not social-consciousness raising books. They are primarily for entertainment and I can’t find anything entertaining about the sordid world of trafficking or pedophilia, which also plays heavily in the brothers’ stories. I won’t be reading anymore of these books though I liked the characters.