Review: Night's Cold Kiss by Tracey O'Hara

Night's Cold Kiss is the first book in the Dark Brethren Series.

Antoinette Petrescu is a Venator, a highly trained vampire hunter. Vampires come in two types: Aeternus - regular vampires, and Dreniacs - vampires who drink until they kill the human. While Antoinette has been trained to fight Dreniacs, she doesn't like Aeternus vampires either. Her mother was killed by a Dreniac in front of her when Antoinette was a child and therefore she has an obsessive hatred of all vampires.

When Antoinette is charged to a mission partnering with an Aeternus, Christian Laroque, she is vehemently opposed but is overruled by her superiors. On the way to the mission, Christian discoveres Antoinette has been injured in a recent vampire attack and it's become infected. He makes a poultice to heal it, which includes some of his blood. Apparently vampire blood is a powerful aphrodisiac and they have hot vamp sex in the airplane. Once vampires go into Blood-thrall (intense sexual arousal) they must complete the act for relief. Naturally when she comes down off her vamp-blood thrall Antoinette is mortified. Christian is confused because the sex with Antoinette was unusually powerful. The romantic tension between them zinged throughout the rest of the book as Antoinette is attracted to Christian and fights her prejudice against vampires.

While investigating some mysterious deaths of females - they all look like Antoinette - some of her superiors are attacked. Antoinette witnesses the attacks; they were attacked by the vampire who killed her mother. He's supposed to be dead - permanently! No one believes Antoinette and she is briefly a suspect.

I give this book 3 1/2 stars. I liked this story - there were a couple of twists I didn't see coming. The death of one particular character was so sad, and the bad guy was not who I thought it was. I'll be on the lookout for book 2 - Death's Sweet Embrace, to be released in September 2010.

Disclaimer - I won this book at Yankee Romance Reviews.