Ashford, Georgia and Dublin, Ireland, One Year Ago

MacKayla (Mac) Lane’s normal life ends when she receives a stored message on her cell phone from her murdered sister, Alina. Finding the killer takes her from the safety of her home in Ashford, Georgia to Dublin, Ireland where Alina worked on a graduate degree. The police won’t help -- even when Mac brings them new evidence, it is dismissed. Only arrogant, aggravating Jericho Barrons helps Mac, most reluctantly, by telling her she is a sidhe-seer, or one of the few humans able to see the ugliness and evil hidden by the Fae’s glamour. Mac doesn’t believe Barrons. Not until she sees beneath the persona of a very handsome man at a local pub. As she eats her favorite French fries drenched in ketchup for dinner, she hallucinates watching an evil monster sucking the beauty from the woman he escorts. It has to be just a gruesome hallucination, doesn’t it? So Mac believes, until the creature turns to stare at her. Mac runs to Barrons for explanations, knowing she will never eat French fries again.

Barrons flings Mac into the surreal world of the Faery. Seelie and Unseelie are Fae; both are dangerous, but the Unseelie are often deadly. After that, Mac only experiences bad surprises, like finding out that she isn’t really a Lane but an O’Connor. Totally alone and unable to trust anyone, or at times her own eyes, Mac accompanies Barrons into a world of evil to discover who killed Alina. She knows Barrons uses her. He finds her talent at uncovering OOPs (objects of power) valuable. Alina warned her in that last phone call to find the Sinsar Dubh, a book that holds the deadliest of magic, but Mac is only driven to bring Alina’s murderer to justice, not save the world.

While this first volume isn’t heavily into romance, you will find Mac an engaging character. Barbie blonde, fashionable, glib, witty and perky with ingrained Southern manners and strong rules for hospitality, Mac defies her stereotype. She is very intelligent. She realizes sophisticated, European man-of-the-world Barrons thinks she's a dumb blonde joke. While Ms. Moning never lets you get beneath Barrons’s skin, you will find him an intriguing man. And it is nice to know that while Barrons guides Mac’s transformation from a naïve young woman into a suspicious, Goth-style bloodhound, she never loses her love for Ice Princess Blush nail polish.

Dublin is a fantastic site for the background of DARKFEVER, adding a timeless sense of magic and mystery in a world gone suddenly and dangerously mad. While Mac’s tongue-in-cheek humor threads through her story, her first person account of her perils adds chilling and dark moments that will glue you to her journey. If DARKFEVER is anything to go by, this paranormal series promises plenty of exciting reading ahead.

Robin Lee