Review: Dark Kiss (Nightwatchers #1) by Michelle Rowan

Publisher: May 22, 2012 Harlequin Teen
Genre: Paranormal, Fantasy
Format: Kindle
Source: Purchased

Goodreads Summary
I don't do dangerous.

Smart, über-careful, ordinary Samantha-that's me. But I just couldn't pass up a surprise kiss from my number-one unattainable crush. A kiss that did something to me...something strange. Now I feel hungry all the time, but not for food. It's like part of me is missing-and I don't know if I can get it back.

Then there's Bishop. At first I thought he was just a street kid, but the secrets he's keeping are as intense as his unearthly blue eyes. If he's what I think he is, he may be the only one who can help me. But something terrifying is closing in, and the one chance Bishop and I have to stop it means losing everything I ever wanted and embracing the darkness inside me....

NIGHTWATCHERS

When angels and demons must work together, something beyond evil is rising...

Bishop it's just you - Mahogany and Blue

I am a sucker for books about angels and demons and take a look at that cover. However, Dark Kiss neither wow'd me nor did I hate it.

The Good

It starts out with a familiar relationship of two best girl friends, one who is lamenting a bad relationship with a cheater and one who is crushing on an older boy. Samantha, who has this crush, unexpectedly gets a kiss from Stephen, and he just walks away but not without leaving a life-changing hole inside her.

Once she meets Bishop, the story starts taking a turn from teen drama to a more paranormal read. There are electrical sparks, there is a feeling that the two need to be around each other, and yes this has all been done before. I would put the insta-love in the bad category, but Bishop really made the book for me so it was important that he was around as often as he was. Thankfully, the reasons behind it are a little different as it was important for Sam to help Bishop on his quest by finding beams of light. That sounds really strange, but stay with me here. They are going around to each of these beams and finding members of Bishop's team who are enjoyable in their own rights. Kraven, who is a demon, shares some juicy information about a past when he and Bishop were humans and I am interested in learning more about these two during that time.

There is also a bee motif throughout the novel. Sam equates her interactions with guys as stings or climbing into the nest. It's really enjoyable imagery for the situations.

The Bad

I don't think I ever got attached to the main character in this one. Sam just wasn't a character that I liked as a protagonist. In the beginning, as she is explaining why she would walk up to a street kid, she tells me that she ran away from home when her parents got a divorce because her mom started working and she should have been her mother's whole world. WHOA! As a single parent, this hits all the wrong buttons for me. What this means to me in the book is that she is a little bratty. I labeled her this way pretty early on so it was hard to draw closer to her.

The Romance

There is some chemistry between Samantha and Bishop that causes good tension and he makes a great romantic interest. Without giving too much away though, all I can really say is that currently their romance is hitting some brick walls.

Conclusion

This book had a nice concept that I hadn't seen put together this way and has potential to go somewhere certainly further in the series. I hope to feel more of a connection with the main character, but the other side characters are an eclectic bunch that I enjoyed learning about.  I will be reading the second one in the series to see where this one goes because I am interested.

Excerpts

My mother thundered down the hallway and yanked open my bedroom door.
"What's wrong?" Her face was pale, her normally perfect blond hair a mess. She pulled her bathrobe tighter around her. Dark circles cut under her pale blue eyes. She suffered from insomnia and usually got only a few hours of sleep a night. A screaming daughter didn't exactly help matters.
I looked at her from my tangle of light pink bedsheets. "Bad dream. Really bad dream."
"A bad dream? That's all it was? I thought you were being murdered in here."

When he entwined our fingers, for just a moment I forgot about everything else - it all slipped away and there was only him. When Bishop was totally sane, I wanted to kiss him so badly I could barely restrain myself.
And the way he looked at me, too, with gratitude and something else, something way deeper and more intense...
"I can practically hear the violins playing," Kraven drawled. "So romantic I could die."