Kerry Allen

Wicked Deeds on a Winter’s Night by Kresley Cole
Mass Market Paperback, 384 pages
ISBN-13: 9781416547037 
Available Now
Retail Price $6.99
Third in the Immortals after Dark Series

There are two kinds of paranormal romances: heavy and light (and I’m not referring to net weight—page count isn’t necessarily indicative of heft). I’m going to use a cake analogy here, because I figure everybody can relate to cake. (Diabetics, my soul weeps for you.)

On the heavy side, you have your chocolate torte, a dense cake steeped in liqueur, layered with gooey fudge filling and covered with a thick layer of ganache. It’s very rich, a special treat you don’t get very often, and scarfing it down borders on sacrilege, so you take your time and linger over every bite.

On the light side, you have your devil’s food cupcake, from box mix to oven to stomach in half an hour, slathered with pink Funfetti frosting and sprinkles. Tasty, plentiful, and readily available any day of the week, so you’re free to inhale it and go back for more.

They’re both good, both satisfying in their way, just a different level of intensity.

(Since I already got an email, let me make this absolutely, positively clear: I am not in any way deriding cupcakes. I love cupcakes. I WRITE cupcakes, for crying out loud. Cupcakes rule.)

Kresley Cole is a paranormal cupcake. Her books contain the violence and broad cast of characters and expansive mythology and hot-hot-sexy that you’ll find in a heavier paranormal, but she delivers them with a quick pace, an abundance of snappy dialogue, and a good dose of humor that makes the story fly by.

The Ingredients

The Hie: A big supernatural scavenger hunt, the winner of which receives a key that will allow him to go back in time, twice, and alter events that didn’t work out the way he wanted the first time around. (Readers of No Rest for the Wicked saw the same contest from the perspective of Kaderin and Sebastian.)

The Hero: Bowen MacRieve, 1200-year-old werewolf, who wants that key to go back about 200 years and prevent the death of his mate, for without his one true love, life has no meaning and he might as well just die. (Yeah, he’s the one who got blown all to hell in NRftW.)

The Heroine: Mariketa the Awaited, 23-year-old witch with heaps of witchy potential that has yet to manifest in any fashion that makes all the awaiting worthwhile, who joined the contest for something do while she’s awaiting her transition to immortality and the awakening of her fantabulous powers.

Combine the first three ingredients. Bowe and Mari are vying for the prize hidden in some Mayan ruins when they get distracted by their mutual hotness. Bowe has been celibate since the death of his mate, and combined with his deep distrust of witches, he believes Mari has worked some magic on him to make him behave like a horny dog so she can eliminate the competition. In keeping with the spirit of the Hie, he drops a few tons of rock over the only escape route, entombing her so he has a head start toward his certain victory. Right before he does so, however, Mari manages to zap him with a spell that nullifies his immortality. She figures as soon as he realizes his boo-boos aren’t healing, he’ll return directly to let her out so she can undo the hex.

(In all fairness to Bowe, it is a dirty competition, Mari shot off her mouth about her super witchy powers, so he thought she’d eventually get out, and he also thought she was immortal already, so nothing really tragic could befall her in the meantime. He didn’t realize he was being that much of an asshole when he did it.)

Turn up the heat. Those who read NRftW know Sebastian won the Hie, so Bowe obviously isn’t getting his dead girlfriend back as planned. He’s also not in real great shape by the time he loses. He’s taken back to the family kennel to recover, at which time he learns Mari never came back. She’s been missing for three weeks, and her friends are pissed—throwing-cars-around, shooting-lightning-everywhere, major-immortal-war-on-your-hands pissed. He has until the end of the week to bring her back, or all hell is going to break loose.

Needless to say, Mari’s not real pleased to see her “rescuer,” literally goes for his throat, and discovers she can harness her power just fine when it’s directed toward smacking him around. She’d just as soon kill his mangy ass, but since she’s still mortal and they’re in the middle of a jungle where the guerillas and the drug cartels and all those other gun-happy folks are tearing the place up with bullets, she’s going to need his protection to get back to civilization in one piece.

Now, some well-meaning soul has suggested to Bowe that his persistent mineminemine matematemate thing could mean Mari is the reincarnation of his dead fiancee, and he’s willing to entertain the possibility, especially the sexsexsex part. If he can knock her up, it will prove she’s his mate, and if not, he can enjoy her in the meantime, then go win the next Hie and dig up the dead girlfriend.

Being the smooth operator he is, Bowe tells Mari all this. Well, what girl wouldn’t be flattered to be the guinea pig in this experiment? Shoot out puppies because destiny says you have to, or serve as a substitute until he has the opportunity to dump you and go fetch the real thing? Mari’s not real pleased with either option (good for her). She echoes my own sentiments about the whole “soulmate” thing: she wants to be loved and protected and lusted after not because of some internal werewolf memo saying that’s the way it is, but because he gets to know her and likes her and CHOOSES her. Without him constantly pining for a dead woman would be a plus, too.

Bowe could benefit from learning (a) honesty is not always the best policy, and (b) the strong, silent type gets a lot of action for a reason. He has terminal foot-in-mouth, so by the time he has a change of heart, he’s screwed things so thoroughly, Mari’s not buying his heartfelt declarations.

Stick a fork in it. Why doesn’t the constant one-step-forward, two-steps-back in the relationship make me want to scream like it usually does? I don’t know, extenuating circumstances that don’t feel completely contrived solely to frustrate the reader? The fact that I like Bowe (tough guy completely at a loss when it comes to winning over the woman he loves) and Mari (strong, liberated, and, dare I say, feisty) enough to put with a lot of crap I otherwise wouldn’t? Plain ol’ fun?

Whatever. It works. A lot of deep introspection to determine the allure seems out of proportion to the book. It’s not going to strain your brain, but it’s an enjoyable way to pass a couple of hours. (It made baking countless dozens of oatmeal-apple cookies pass much more quickly.) I’d call it “a fun romp,” or, back to the (horrendously lame) cake analogy, “a tasty treat.”

Who cares about the nutritional information: Again, people are squicked out about the age difference between hero and heroine, which has never bothered me in a paranormal because:

1. It has been scientifically proven that boys mature less quickly than girls. After a thousand years or so, he might actually be on par with a 20-something female.

2. The Ick Factor with vast age differences in real-life relationships, for me, has a great deal to do with the older party’s shriveled, sagging, and decaying appearance. Who truly wants to get intimate with their grandma’s contemporaries? There pretty much has to be a financial motivation or a psychological issue driving that pairing, which is more disturbing than any disparity in experience. In a paranormal romance, even if a character is 10,000 years old, he’s usually been preserved in peak physical condition, so an attraction is believable.

3. In this case particularly, the younger party isn’t some wilting violet who’s going to be blown away by the elder’s great wisdom. Mari even rags on Bowe for being an old man. And he can’t play the wisdom card on her because by the end of the book, she knows every-frickin’-thing. She’s also powerful in other ways (sexually, magically), enough to measure up to him despite her dearth of chronological years.

Unless the ancient one is perpetually treating the young one like an infant (occasional teasing is acceptable), which I don’t recall ever encountering, the age difference isn’t an issue for me at all.

I want Rydstrom’s story. I like him a lot. But the bad-boy vampire next in the series will tide me over nicely. *sigh* Why do I like the nasty ones so much? They go straight to my hips… Oh yeah, that’s why! *snicker*

The first time I saw the cover, I wanted the guy’s coat, but I thought the art looked a little comic bookish. It looks a lot better in person, finer detail or… something. (The visual-perception sphere isn’t really my forte.) And hello—meet every guy I had a crush on prior to the age of 25. (That shaggy goth thing still trips my trigger, but it’s now harder to find it on a guy who isn’t jailbait. I think the cutoff of acceptability is somewhere around 35, anyway. After that, I expect a guy to get a haircut to demonstrate he’s a Responsible Adult. *swoon*Trent*sigh*)