Review Dark Sins and Desert Sands by Stephanie Draven
Escaping a hellish Syrian prison, U.S. serviceman Ray Stavrakis emerged with uncanny mind-control powers and an eerie ability to morph into a mythical Minotaur. As a half man, half bull, Ray had legendary power, but only one woman could prove his innocence. The woman who’d driven him to the brink of insanity with her cool-eyed interrogation and her hot-blooded sensuality.
But Vegas psychologist Layla Bahset had no memory of Ray or her past. Only a feeling of being stalked by a nonhuman predator. Was it Ray…whose eyes condemned her soul even as his hands ignited her body? Or was another evil force at work? But nothing could stop Layla from remembering what she was…and what her evil creator had planned for her and her soldier lover….
I thought I was going to hate this book and initially I did. I thought it was tragic, loosely plotted, predictable crap until I kept reading and discovered that the author had one helluva ace up her sleeve as you kept reading. As you kept going deeper into the novel the story became more and more complex until it scarecely resembled the hard pressed oddly presented romance novel it resembled at first.
Honestly there was SO much going on in this book at the end its was and is still difficult to suss out what the point of all of it was. I mean he was a minotaur, there was the wars going on between Gods, the goddesses and gods losing their powers, the major betrayal about the US Governmental secrets and that false imprisonment intrigue, the weird possessive nature of the odd ex husband..
After getting 40% of the way into the story, you completely get turned around. There is simply so much to this book that there is no way for you as the reader to keep track of it and quite frankly it seems that perhaps Ms. Draven got mixed up in her own story lines as well. After a time you end up reading the book just confused about what was happening and why.
Even when there was this great passion between the two of them, even when there was great tension and potential, there was this cloud of complete confusion hovering over the story simply because it was so unnecessarily complicated.
What could have been a fantastic novel about a military hero being falsely accused, tortured, seeking revenge and finding another victim where he had thought to find an aggressor, it just becomes a terribly confusing mess.
Overall Rating: C
