S1 Ep5 When He’s Dark by Suzanne Wright: Review

I can’t believe that I have been reading paranormal romance for so long, and yet this is my first Suzanne Wright book. Especially as she is all about shifters! But, better late than never. Now that I have read it, am I in a big rush to dive into Wright’s back list? No, not really. I enjoyed it, it was a fun read but I didn’t feel compelled afterwards to read any more of her work.

When He’s Dark is the first in the Olympus Pride series, which is a spin off of the Phoenix Pack series. As a Wright newbie, I haven’t read any of the Phoenix Pack series, however, that didn’t prove much of a problem. I’ve often found that “spin off” series don’t work as standalone; they need you to have read the original series first. This wasn’t the case with When He’s Dark. I could tell it was a spin off as there were some couples in it who had clearly been the hero and heroine of other books, but that didn’t detract from my understanding.

The issue I had with this book and that really prevented me from rating it more than 3 stars, is both the pacing and how passive it was. It’s a kind of friends to lovers situation and the hero and heroine get together fairly early on in this book without any unnecessary drama. I say unnecessary, however, a little bit of something between them may have added to my enjoyment of the book. They had great chemistry, the banter was good and the sex scenes were smoking, but the relationship between them wasn’t moving the story forward. For me, it felt like yup…they’re together. Now what?

What moved the story forward were outside forces, someone was trying to kidnap the heroine as they believed she had some information. So the book is basically her waiting around to be kidnapped, someone attempting to kidnap her. Rinse and repeat. Honestly, it was kind of boring. I think because the HEA part of the romance seemed to be 95% resolved at the beginning, and the kidnapping plot wasn’t actually that interesting, this book fizzled out early for me.

However…I did find a new obsession: PALLAS CATS! Our heroine shifts into a Pallas cat and because I didn’t know what these cats looked like I ended up googling them and then fell down a rabbit hole. Pallas cats are the BEST! They’re cute grumpy faces are adorable, their fluffy ochre coats are just begging for me to pet them…although they are pretty aggressive so that probably isn’t a great idea. But, that was another thing I liked about this book, it didn’t shift to the usual species of shifters, we ended up with something a little different.

Although I am not in a rush to read Suzanne Wright again, I did enjoy this book, the dialogue was especially good and made me chuckle. But, my take away from this book…I LOVE PALLAS CATS.