My name is Meredith 'Merry' Gentry, but of course it's not my real name. I dare not even whisper my true name after dark for fear that one hushed word will travel over the night winds to the soft ear of my aunt, the Queen of Air and Darkness. She wants me dead. I don't even know why...
I fled the high court of Faerie three years ago and have been in hiding ever since. As Merry Gentry, I am a private investigator for the Grey Detective Agency: Supernatural Problems, Magical Solutions. My magical skills, scorned at the courts of Faerie, are valued in the human world. Even by human standards, my magic isn't flashy, which is fine by me. Flashy attracts attention and I can't afford that.
Rumour has it that I am dead. Not quite. I am Princess Meredith NicEssus. To speak that name after dark is to call down a knock upon your door from a hand that can kill you with a touch. I have been careful, but not careful enough. The shadows have found me, and they are going to take me back home, one way or another.
So the running is over. But the fighting has just begun...
MY THOUGHTS
I’ve never read a Laurell K. Hamilton novel before, but she’s known for two popular and well-loved series, so I decided to check out her Merry Gentry books, starting with A Kiss of Shadows. The synopsis intrigued me: a faerie princess in hiding, living in Los Angeles as a private investigator at a law firm? That sounded promising. Unfortunately, the book went downhill fast and never recovered.
If you’ve read Urban Fantasy, especially from the early 2000s when this book was published, you’re probably familiar with the genre’s typical format: a central plot (usually a mystery), a personal or romantic subplot, and an overarching storyline that spans the series. A Kiss of Shadows doesn’t follow that structure at all. In the very first chapter, we meet Merry as a PI and a princess in hiding. You’d think the story would revolve around keeping her identity secret while solving a case but nope. Within a couple of chapters, her identity is revealed, and the case she was working on is quickly dropped and never mentioned again.
Once her identity is exposed, Merry is swept back into the Faerie Court and plunged into political intrigue. Naturally, not everyone is thrilled by her return, and predictably, assassination attempts follow. She’s constantly surrounded by a cadre of supposedly elite warriors who are all eager to protect her... and, of course, sleep with her.
I didn’t enjoy Merry as a character. Everything came too easily for her. She fled the court and wanted nothing to do with it, but suddenly she’s more powerful than the queen, named heir to the throne, and every man she encounters is instantly obsessed with her? Come on. Even more frustrating was the repeated reminder that she’s descended from five fertility gods, making her irresistible to every single male. Yet these so-called strong warriors all behave like lovesick teenagers whenever she’s around. It got old fast.
For a book that was absurdly long, A Kiss of Shadows had no real plot and very little actually happened. The story essentially follows Merry as she’s pursued by a parade of men from Los Angeles to the Faerie Court and back again, all of them waiting for their turn in her bed. The characters were flat and two-dimensional, the plot was nonexistent, and there wasn’t even a single memorable scene.
I don’t recommend this book; there are far better faerie novels out there.
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