Shades of Midnight shifted gears and unlike the lots of detours and side-quests we'd gotten from the previous books in the series, this one was fully focused on the fight against the shades and Asher, with the Black Wings, the nephs and the humans now working together to defeat this powerful, alien force.

We finally found out what the deal between Bane and Lilith had been—no spoilers, tho!

And the RH hit its stride—finally. However—and this may be because I took a break between reading books one and two, and then the other three—I gotta confess I'm not feeling it. WHICH IS SUCH A HUGE BUMMER. I'm told she loves them all, but the emotion isn't coming through as romantic for me. She does care for the guys, but instead of romance, I'm getting friendly vibes with a sprinkle of horniness on top.

But that also may be because of how mild the spice level is? With a half-succubus main character, I was expecting a full 5 out of 5 🌶️ on the spiciness scale, but instead, this series is all about the poetic descriptions and the fade-to-blacks. All very demure, and very mindful. And while that may have been totally fine in some other context, I expected burn-your-face-off hot smut from my sexual-demon leading lady, so saying I'm disappointed is a bit of an understatement. We didn't even get a hint of a group scene. The only intimacy that involved more than two characters consisted in sleeping snuggled up.

Shades of Midnight was still plenty entertaining, but felt a lot slower than previous books and left quite a bit to be desired in the romance department.