top of page
Nov 3, 20204 min read

New Release: Their Dark Reflections


Book Title: Their Dark Reflections

Author: Amanda Meuwissen

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

Cover Artist: Tiferet Design

Genre: Dark Paranormal M/M Romance

Length: 70 096 words/204 pages


Everyone has a second face.

Personal assistant Sam Coleman can do it all: housekeeping, groundskeeping, bookkeeping. The catch? It’s a con.

Ed Simon, his newest millionaire boss, doesn’t know Sam Goldman is a Robin Hood for hire who targets rich jerks. Sure, Sam keeps the money for himself, his crew, and his real employers, but at least they only steal from bad people.

Until sweet, fumbling Ed, who doesn’t seem to have a single vice. Too bad the people who hired Sam won’t let him back out. They want Ed’s money, and they’ll hurt Sam and his friends to get it.

For years Ed has kept people at arm’s length, but Sam’s charms wear down his defenses—just as he learns their budding relationship was an act. Sam isn’t who Ed thought he was, but Ed has a dark secret too: he’s a vampire. And someone is framing him for a series of bloody murders.

When the real villains force their hand, Sam and Ed must choose: work together, trust each other, and give in to the feelings growing between them… or let what might have been bleed out like the victims piling at their feet.


My Review

4/5 stars

There are a lot of different elements at play in this story. A con-artist/ thief is hired by local mob bosses to infiltrate and steal from a man who turns out to be a vampire, while at the same time there is a murder investigation going on, and the mob bosses are working for someone else even more dangerous. With so many different elements to this story, it still manages to stay streamlined. For example, the reveal that Ed is a vampire. I was a little worried at first when the story started by hinting at some dark secret about Ed since the story summary tells us he is a vampire. I feared it would spend too much time dancing around a reveal we already know, but the story got to the reveal quickly, and then moved on to how our characters deal with this reality.

It was also refreshing that Sam adapted to this new information in a reasonable about of time. Obviously not right away, as it would be unrealistic for a character to immedialty be on-board with the concept of vampires being real, but he does not linger in denial too long. It was much more fun watching Sam coming around to the idea of partnering with a vampire and using Ed’s abilities to their advantage, than it would be for a person to flounder around in willful ignorance as often happens in these types of stories.

This story is not subtle about who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. The good guys are very good and the bad guys are very bad. It goes so far as to show the bad guys unnecessarily harming a child just to prove how bad they are and make sure the reader feels no sympathy when our main characters then have to kill these bad guys. Sam and Ed often lament about their inner monsters and how they think they are too ‘dark’ to maintain a relationship, but it does come off as mostly talk. Their actions speak for them, and their actions are good. In contrast to our bad guys harming a child, Sam and Ed instead cater to the neighborhood children. They care about other people and go out of their way to only harm ‘bad’ people that the story has made sure to demonstrate are ‘bad’. So, despite talking about the characters’ moral ambiguity, in the end it is very black and white.

There were a few things in the story that I found odd, like the vampire being named Ed. Since this Ed is nothing like the character of Edward Cullen and doubt the Twilight reference was intended, but it is there nonetheless, and I sometimes found it distracting. However, the biggest letdown in the story was probably Sam’s friends Gary and Mim. Their descriptions were interesting and I was initially excited to see Sam, Gary, and Mim acting as a team of thieves. Instead what I got was Sam doing most of the work and only seeing Gary and Mim sitting around the apartment. It sort of felt like they were only there for Sam to take a break from the story, and the plot mostly comes to a stop when he interacts with them. Gary does some tech stuff, mostly off page to then just present the solution he found, but Mim doesn’t really do much until the end. Her character was especially disappointing since she was described as the fighter of the group. I was looking forward to seeing this small woman acting as the bodyguard to two larger men, but sadly I never got this. The only action we see from her is at the very end, and she gets in a fight with another woman. This character either needed to be cut, or more needed to be done with her. There were a lot of scenes where Sam was walking into danger alone, and I was left wondering why he wasn’t bringing their designated fighter with him since that is literally her role in the group.

Overall an enjoyable read, with a slightly different twist on a vampire romance story. I’m not sure if there is a sequel planned, or if this is a stand alone story, but the epilogue at the end did set up an interesting scenario (which I won’t spoil) and it would be fun to read about the future adventures of these two.


Author Links

Newsletter Sign-up: http://eepurl.com/gz1_Rn

Giveaway

Enter the Rafflecopter Giveaway for a chance to win one of three ebooks from the author’s backlist.

Comments

bottom of page