Review: "Night Play" by Sherrilyn Kenyon

    Bride has just been dumped and has had it with men.  When a handsome, ripped "man" visits her shop and buys her a beautiful necklace she knows he must be too good to be true.  He finds her, in all her overweight glory, to be gorgeous and wants her in a way no one ever has.  Little does Bride know that he is a Were-hunter wolf with magical powers.  He's on the run from his father's pack and his mother who both want him dead.  With his brother, Fang, in a coma after a recent Daimon attack, Vane soon finds out that Bride is his destined mate.  He has 3 weeks to convince her to accept him as his mate.  When Bride finds out his true nature, will she be able to accept him wolf and all?

     This book takes place in New Orleans where several of the Dark Hunter books have, filled with Daimons, Dark-hunters, Were-hunters, were-bears, were-panthers, gods. goddess and of course Acheron.  There was a little less action than usual in this story.  While the beginning and end had some battles with his family the middle was more just about Vane trying to win over Bride. Since he grew up in a wolf pack and has had little contact with the human world, even after 420 years (which was a little hard to believe) he now finds himself trying to figure out how to date Bride by human standards.  It was cute to watch him be confused by little things Bride did and not quite know how to handle it and it made for a very sweet story.  He seemed to do just fine on instinct alone.  I loved that Bride is not the perfect skinny, model type that we see in a lot of romance books but was a rather flawed character.  Vane certainly sees past that and loves everything about her.  He comes to her rescue with the ex boyfriend a couple of times too which was great and very funny!  With his magic he could change her but chooses not to and that was very sweet to me.  Even though he's an alpha male he seems to be one of the sweeter of the Hunters we've seen so far.  Maybe it was just because they had a chance to have some "dating time" in the middle where they weren't wrapped up in some giant battle the entire time.  He has one mixed up family to deal with though.  His father has been sending warriors out to kill Vane while at the same time his mother has been trying to do the same thing.  His mother lives in a different time period and while Vane can time travel, his mother can not.  She must send demons after him and Bride instead.  Turns out Vane has even more family than he thought too.  This is the first Dark Hunter book that has focused on a Were-Hunter so they also gave us a little more info on the two types of Werewolves.  It was nice to get a little more clarity on the two types.  The thing that bothered me the most in this story was Bride's name, so if that was my biggest complaint that's not too bad.  We also got to see a lot of old characters in this one like Kyrian, Acheron, the bear clan, Grace, Valerius, Nick, Otto and Simi.  We got to know Valerious a little more since we haven't really seen to much of him it was good to see the other side of him before his upcoming book.  As usual, Acheron's parts just make it that much harder for me to wait until his book.  That is one mysterious man!  Overall, this was a pretty good book.  It definitely had a different feel than the previous Dark Hunter books but I really enjoyed Vane and Bride's story.