Stolen Night – review

Author: Rebecca Maizel

First Published: 2012

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: After 500 years as a Vampire Queen a sinister ritual transformed Lenah Beaudonte into a living, breathing teenage girl – a girl with a beating heart, capable once again of human love.

Now Lenah has been presented with an impossible choice: go back through history to before she became the cruel vampire that she once was and undo all her evil deeds, but never meet and fall in love with the darkly gorgeous Rhode. Or continue with her life in the present with Rhode nearby but beyond her reach forever…

The review: When I read Rebecca Maizel’s first volume about Lenah Beaudonte, Infinite Days, I felt I was reading a book of fairly solid prose but one that more captured the thoughts and feelings of a teen girl rather than a five hundred+ year old vampire.

This book saw the outlook become more mature. The love story was just as tragic but I was still unsure of the logic that saw a vampire, twisted with the pain of deadened senses (as happens with the vampires in this series) into one of the most evil creatures to have prowled the planet still lay claim to a heart-wrenching true love, a love that spanned centuries.

However, taking that with a leap of faith, this was again a book of solid prose. Tragic romance aside, it instilled a supernatural peril from the get-go as the three ex-vampires central to the story found themselves under the scrutiny of the Aeris – a representation of the four natural elements – due to their breach of elemental balance in returning to life and, more dangerously, a coven of vampires after the secret of the ritual that restored the dead to life.

The reason for the coven wanting the ritual was one of power and twisting the ritual with dark intent, rather than returning to life themselves, which seemed somewhat convoluted at best but it allowed Maizel to bring in the supernatural peril and also conveniently hold it at bay for the majority of the novel’s length as the vampires could not actually kill the holders of the secret.

So again I wasn’t overly sure about the story premise, though the idea of a story focused on ex-vampires still intrigued. The twist in the epilogue simply to allow a third book also broke the story symmetry that Maizel had created. Again a shame. But again the prose was solid enough. 5.5 out of 10.

This review first appeared on Amazon UK as part of the Vine Programme.