Archangel’s Heart – Nalini Singh

I made a serious error here. It turns out that this is Book #9 of a series, which I didn’t realise and I haven’t read anything else from. OOPS. My bad. (Although, if Archangel’s Heart is anything to go by, I would never have made it as far as Book #9).

One of the world’s most vicious angels has vanished. Her lands are being taken over by a vampire uprising, so a mysterious angelic sect known as the Luminata call a meeting of all the archangels to decide what should be done. Raphael and his consort, Elena, travel to Morocco to meet with the rest of the archangels, but something does not feel right. The charismatic head of the Luminata is constantly watching Elena, and dark secrets begin to emerge from the cracks. Digging deep into the mystery, Elena discovers more than she bargained for, including brutal truths about what happened to her own family.

Although the story sounds exciting on the surface, it’s mainly about these angel couples (Raphael and Elena in particular). Literally everyone seems to be part of a pair. This really dampened the pace and excitement, because most of the book was just a whole load of relationship blah. The writing is actually very good, but there is far too much focus on emotion and description and one character admiring another. Like, that’s sweet but give me some story please! The plot beneath it all was really rather good, but it was so completely overshadowed by drivel that I almost didn’t notice when something interesting was going on. It just could have been so much better (and shorter). Really disappointed.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.