Unfortunately, he’s a soldier under orders from Warner, a power-hungry 19-year-old. Adam, it turns out, is immune to her deadly touch. After months of isolation, her captors suddenly give her a cellmate-Adam, a drop-dead gorgeous guy. Juliette’s journal holds her tortured thoughts in an attempt to repress memories of the horrific act that landed her in a cell. Juliette was torn from her home and thrown into an asylum by The Reestablishment, a militaristic regime in control since an environmental catastrophe left society in ruins. Historical, multicultural New Orleans is depicted with all its racism-Bastien is multiracial (quadroon and Taíno) and Celine’s French father was always secretive about her Asian mother.Ī dystopic thriller joins the crowded shelves but doesn't distinguish itself. Eventually, the romantic storyline gets quite steamy.

But those returning bits of memory shouldn’t be possible, not with how powerful Nico is. Handsome detective Michael is patient with her every step of the way she wishes she could return his feelings, but nagging flashes of memory have her looking for someone else. Meanwhile, Celine recovers from residual traumas from experiences that she can’t remember-because of a head injury, or so she’s been told.

On top of that, multiple members of the Saint Germains’ vampire family gain greater prominence in third-person point-of-view chapters that frequently reveal their backstories. The mythologies hinted at before (the Fallen, the Brotherhood, the Otherworld, the Sylvan Wyld’s Winter Court, and the Summer Court of the Sylvan Vale) are unveiled in expansive worldbuilding. Volatile, he embraces vices until his uncle, having given up on molding Bastien as a human legacy, decides on even higher aspirations for Bastien, ambitions in the Otherworld that the vampires had been banished from. Following The Beautiful(2019), Bastien and Celine struggle with the consequences of her deal with Nicodemus.Īfter Celine traded her memories of them in exchange for his powerful vampire uncle Nico’s turning him, Bastien’s reborn as a vampire-and he’s not happy about it.

Renee ahdieh the damned