Beneath the Night

by Jen Colly

[Sarah Says]

Beneath the Night is the third book in the The Cities Below series and each book focus on different vampires and as such can be read as a standalone. I don’t feel that my enjoyment was hindered by not reading the earlier books.

I found Beneath the Night to be quite clean for a vampire romance. A lot of adult vampire romances lean towards smut. Now I’m not bagging out vampire smut, I’ve read and loved a fair bit of it in my time, but I don’t want to be reading it all the time – it was a nice surprise that I found refreshing.

The vampires – Extremely civilized and human feeling. They sleep during the day and are still burnt by sunlight, so normal vampy stuff there, but eat regular food as well as drinking blood. They can survive without blood, but they age without it. Most of them live in underground cities, the one that this book is set in being called Balinese.

Multiple POV’s - We meet POV Savard first, then Cat, Then Navarre. The swapping between was well placed and smooth, never impacting on the flow of the overall story line.

I found myself drawn to the dark, mysterious and pining Savard. At first I thought Savard was pining for his friend, the fallen Lord Navarre, ruler of Balinese. Later it became more apparent that while he carried deeply for his Lord, he was pining for the freedom he’d lost in having to temporarily take over for Navarre and run Balinese.

I liked Cat from the moment we met her. She is a ballsy, fierce and loyal Mumma/vampire vixen. She’s lives with PTSD from a childhood she keeps hidden and is very standoff-ish towards everybody who isn’t one of her five adopted children, Savard or her guard duty partner Dyre.

I found myself shipping Cat with Savard before we met Navarre, which is one of the reasons I think I found it hard to connect to Navarre or get into the romance between He and Cat. There wasn’t any dislike, I just didn’t connect to him as much as I did the other two POV’s. He was asleep for the start of the book, recovering from a demon attack, while we were getting to know Cat and Savard and I think that probably contributed to the lack of connection also.

The Plot – As well as the fated mates romance storyline, there is a who’s the bad guy storyline (which is full of run ins with demons, battles to the death and for me it’s what propelled the story along).

All in all, I found Beneath the Night to be a quick and entertaining read.