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Book Review of Ecstasy Unveiled (Demonica, Bk 4)

Ecstasy Unveiled (Demonica, Bk 4)
Ecstasy Unveiled (Demonica, Bk 4)
Author: Larissa Ione
Genre: Romance
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
PengQueen avatar reviewed on + 114 more book reviews


This is the fourth book in the Demonica series, of which I am a fan. If you haven't yet been introduced to them I'd strongly recommend starting with book one, Pleasure Unbound. The series follows a group of demon brothers who run a hospital for other demons and mythical creatures. They are Seminus demons, who are very sexually driven and recquire a mate upon reaching a certain age in order to retain their sanity. The style has some similarity to books by J.R. Ward, Kresley Cole, and Gena Showalter--dark and violent but with strong undertones of romance and humor.

This particular book centers around long lost brother, Lore, who is half human. He works as an enslaved assasin and has been commanded to kill Kynan, a human who is very close to the rest of the demon family (as established in previous books). The consequences for failure would include the death of his beloved twin sister, Sin. Iness is essentially Kynan's gaurdian angel, and she's trying to earn her way into heaven by keeping him safe--which of course means stopping Lore at all costs. Things become complicated when Iness and Lore find themselves attracted to one another, to the point where Lore wants her as his mate. All the while Lore's brothers are struggling to hold their hospital together through a variety of disasters, and loyalties are divided between Kynan and Lore.

I loved a lot of the ideas in this book, from the glimses of hell and the assasine underworld to the mythology and culture of the angels. The use of these and the images they present make the book compelling. I generally liked Lore and Iness as a couple, though I felt their romance lacked build-up of chemistry which couples in the previous books had in spades. The author also does a fairly good job at presenting compelling secondary and returning characters without distracting from the central couple.

On the negative end, the plot was a bit disconjointed. It's fast paced and there's plenty of action, but we rarely get much exlpanation about whats going on. It goes from plot device to plot device without any concern for what the "rules" are in this world, why things are the way they are, and how or why characters perform certain actions. But what bothered me was that there's so much build up about how various people are under angelic protection, apparently because they have important world changing tasks to perform. We therefore expect to see this resolved, i.e. discover why they person is so important. But it's not resolved. Plot holes like this are designed to sell the next books, but they frustrate readers like myself who like to feel like they've read a complete story when a book ends.

Overall, if you liked the previous books in the Demonica series this one is worth the read. If you haven't tried them yet and you're a fan of dark paranormal romance I'd recommend them.