Bound by Flames (Night Prince, #3)

by Jeaniene Frost

[Melanie]

4.5 stars for story and narration.

My review and an extended sample of the audiobook are posted at Hotlistens.com.

Originally, this spinoff from the Night Huntress series was supposed to be a trilogy. I was extremely exciting to hear that before this book was published, that Jeaniene Frost would be adding a book to the Night Prince series to make it a total of four books (makes up for losing a Cat & Bones book). I do give kudos to Ms Frost for writing the story that should be told and not just writing the pages/books contracted (and her publishers for letting her).

I don’t want to go too much into the plot, as there would be lots of spoilers. I will mention that is one of the darkest and most violent books that I’ve read from Frost. There are some pretty horrific torture scenes, but they aren’t written in much detail, so I wouldn’t let that scare you away, if you’re worried about being squeamish. There is so much else in this book, I would hate for you to miss this story based on that small amount of torture.

In Bound by Flames, we get to see a different side of Vlad that we’ve seen in the earlier Night Prince or even the Night Huntress books. There are two aspects to this. One, we saw a softer side of Vlad when he was talking with Leila and show her his vulnerabilities. We also saw how terrifying Vlad would be if anything happened to Leila. He would burn the world to the ground.

We get to see some of our favorite characters from Night Huntress. Mencheres and Marie Laveau both have larger appearances. There is also Leila’s father and sister, Marty, Maximus. Cat and Bones even make an appearance, but I would’ve loved to see more of them (never too much Cat and Bones). If you haven’t read/listened to Up from the Grave yet, there is a spoiler in this book. (I would recommend reading all the spinoff books in the order they were written in comparison to the Night Huntress books, as they do all tie together. Check out Jeaniene Frost’s site for reading order for the series).

Narration
Tavia Gilbert did a great job as always with the narration. She has done the narration for the entire Night Huntress books and all the spinoffs, including Night Princes. I love the voice that Gilbert does for Vlad with his Romanian accent (though I’ve never met anyone with a real Romanian accent to compare, but I love the way it sounds whether it is actually accurate or not). Because of my love her voice of Vlad, I actually like her better for the Night Prince books better than Night Huntress just because I love listening to Vlad (not that I don’t love her for Night Huntress too :-) ). I’ve got some other books from Gilbert on audio that are not written by Frost,