picked this one up for free at a library giveaway and read it on vacation when all of my other books were exhausted; time that,
in retrospect, would have been better spent in virtually any other pursuit. I have not read anything else by this author, so perhaps this is her style, but I thought this was one of the most poorly-written novels I've ever read. The prose is weak, the descriptions are cursory, and the dialogue is barely serviceable. The worst thing though, is the deception practiced by the author, in order to attempt to create some suspense, purely by withholding information from the reader.
To the scores:
Prince of Darkness, by Barbara
Michaels
Plot: 3
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 3/5
Characters: 3
Horror: 2
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 2
Page Turner: 3
Re-readability: 3
Overall: 2
"Deception?" you
ask? Yes. I shall try to explain.
The book opens with a man being hired to do a job, and the events are presented in such as way that we think he's going to kill an innocent woman, or at least drive her insane in some sort of plot to get her money. The book is from his POV for the first 2/5 or so, and then just as his plan is going well he makes a huge discovery that we don't share with him, one that changes his entire outlook on things -- at which point the book's POV changes to that of the woman who he was trying to drive crazy with cheap ghostly parlor tricks. The novel then proceeds from her POV, while the initial male character starts behaving completely differently, with no explanation given. We get the thoughts of the female lead from then on, but never enough to answer the basic mysteries of the tale. The author simply had to switch to her POV since if we'd stayed with the man's we would have learned what was going on, instead of having it drawn out for another 100 pages.
This book is not a mystery, since there aren't any clues given that would let you figure things out in advance. Rather, it's cheaply-deceptive because the suspense is generated entirely by the author withholding information from the reader and switching the POV around to keep us on the outside. On top of that, the final reveal is melodramatic and cheesy to the extreme; think of every bad twist you'd see in a soap opera, and you'll see it in this novel. Dead characters coming back to life, secret identities, hidden relationships between characters, and so on.
Great writing and characters might have redeemed this, at least partly, but there is none to be found. The main male lead is just some English guy with no particular distinguishing traits, the woman is skittish and uninteresting, and when basically every other character in the novel suddenly turns out to be a murderous demon, it's not believable and is just silly. We didn't care about the other people, nor the main characters, so why should we care when the ridiculous events of the climax begin to take place? The book also cheats on every bit of potential gore, sex, confrontation, etc. Just as something passionate is about to happen, the narrative skips to another POV, or forward in time until after the events have already taken place.
I was hoping for a good suspenseful tale with some horror, occult, or even romance, and I was disappointed to find nothing but cheap thrills and obfuscation by a mediocre novelist. Really, the author should have realized she didn't have enough plot to support a novel, and rather than going forward with the cheap tricks required to eek out 220 pages and barely qualify as a novel, she should have put this on the back burner and given it more thought. Some more plot twists and another few scenes with the townsfolk would have fleshed out this tale and might have given it enough meat to pass.
As it is, I can't recommend this book at all, and no, it's not good enough to bother going into further detail about the individual rating categories.
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