Review: A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole

A Hunger Like No Other

Kresley Cole

Immortals After Dark Series: Book 1

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0987-5

ISBN-10: 1-4165-0987-9

What happens when the Lykae King mates with a half-Valkyrie, half-Vampire beauty? Well… trouble ensues, chaos erupts, and yep – fangs are flashed!  In this first novel of the Immortals After Dark series, Kresley Cole introduces us to a world that exists beyond our imagining but nestled (for the most part) comfortably within our own.  Balanced on the brink of the Accession, all the factions of the Lore are gearing up for war but before the real battles begin, alliances will be made.

After being imprisoned and tortured for more than a century by the Vampire Horde, Lachlain MacRieve – king of the Lykae – escapes when he scents his mate somewhere close.  Maddened from the pain of his torture he is astonished and suitably horrified when he discovers that his mate is in fact a vampire.  Yet he can’t let her go because he realizes, even then, that she’s likely his only means of healing.

When Emmaline Troy left the safety of her coven and traveled to Paris with hopes of finding out who her father was and whether he is still alive, she never dreamed that she would be more-or-less abducted by a raging werewolf.  Even more unlikely, she never would have expected to be so drawn to him, or so attracted to him… at least during his moments of sanity.  Having always been known as Emma the Co-ed and Emma the Coward, Lachlain’s brief windows of madness terrify her.  Until she realizes that even in the deepest depths of his darkness he wouldn’t hurt her, she constantly wonders when he’s going to strike and whether she’ll be able to survive his attack.

Then what has always been forbidden comes to her and she discovers within herself a strength and power that she never believed that she could possess.  Lachlain watches as the seemingly timid vampire becomes the powerful Halfling that is his true mate.  As they become closer, the question of who her father was becomes more and less important to them both and they all – Emma, Lachlain, and her Valkyrie aunts – wonder just who the vampires seem to be searching for; for the Valkyrie have always kept her existence a secret from the vampires, and yet those creatures continue to search for some mysterious “her.” 

Is it Emma that they look for? And who exactly is looking – Demestriu (the crazy King of the Horde), Ivo (the vampire who seeks to take his place), the Forebearers (an opposing faction of vampires made of turned humans that don’t drink blood directly from the flesh), or some other faction that they don’t even know of…

The Accession a period of time that occurs roughly every 500 years, where Lore-beings stand against Lore-beings in war… a ‘built-in’ population control.  (from the Book of Lore glossary in this novel) “And a time shall pass that all immortal beings in the Lore, from the strongest Valkyrie, vampire, and Lykae factions, to the phantoms, shifters, fairies, sirens… must fight and destroy each other.”

And if you're interested... Check out this fan-made video, featuring the main characters of the first 9-10 stories of the Immortal After Dark series.