Break the Night, by Anne Stuart

Break the Night came to my attention when I was taking a look at Anne Stuart's redesigned website. She has a section called OOP gems, and there were quite a few books there that I found very interesting. But BTN was among the ones I had in my TBR already, so that was where I started.

A silent scream, a bloodstained knife...

A century past, the faceless killer had strolled out of the London fog and into history, the most infamous murderer who ever lived. And reporter J.R. Damien knew he had never died, could never die. It was impossible, and yet it was true--Saucy Jack was back, plying his trade in the back alleys of Venice, California.

Lizzie Stride refused to accept the ravings of this man who swore she was fated to die, again and again, at the hands of a long-dead madman. But J.R. Damien's haunted eyes told her she must follow in a century-old dance of death and desire with a man who feared he was the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper.

Lizzie Stride is a woman under siege. A Jack the Ripper wannabe is stalking Venice, California, and while he hasn't targeted anyone close to Lizzie, she still has a very personal connection to the crimes. The Venice Ripper leaves all his victims wearing handmade masks, all of which were made by Lizzie.

Lizzie is at her wits' end. The police bring her in every time a body is found and she keeps having to face the same vague suspicion and the same invasive questions time and time again. She'd like nothing better than to get out of town and away from the ugliness until things calm down, but the mask-making trade hasn't been lucrative for Lizzie, and she's perpetually broke, with not even enough money to pay for the gas to get far away from town.

But at least Lizzie's connection to the Venice Ripper has been kept quiet by the police, so she hasn't had to face any public scrutiny. Until, that is, a reporter named J.R. Damien breaks the story.

The murders have hit Damien even harder than they've hit Lizzie. He's been seeing them in his dreams, including details he could never have known that later prove to be exact. He's half convinced he's been committing those murders in his sleep. And maybe for that reason, Damien feels a heavy sense of responsibility for the murders, and is determined to find the culprit and stop him, even if it turns out to be himself.

Once he finally meets Lizzie, the woman he's decided to use as bait, he feels just as heavy a compulsion to protect her and stop her from becoming the Ripper's last victim. Because somehow, he knows that's what she'll be if he doesn't prevent it.

Anne Stuart writes all over the place plotwise, but I think her characters are always recognizable as hers, as both Lizzie and Damien are. Lizzie is her typical helpless heroine caught in a dangerous situation and not able to resist the fascination of a man she should probably be afraid of. But this time it worked for me just fine, because Damien, while showing a lot of the initial coldness and cruelty and tortured character of many of this author's heroes, wasn't as close to the line as others.

Damien was kinder and softer, in some ways, at least on the inside, which we readers could see. His actions towards Lizzie at the beginning didn't show much of it, but seeing the way he was so fascinated by her and couldn't resist her, from the minute he first met her, made them much more palatable for me. And something else that I liked was the view we get of Damien as a teen. It was a shock to see such a dark and tortured hero as a regular teenager, but it succeeded in making him more human to me.

The romance was quite good, and I liked the way Stuart moved it from something in which neither of them consciously wanted to have anything to do with the other, but were not able to resist the compulsion inside of them, to one based on a more genuine liking and knowledge of the other. What I didn't like so much, though, was the constant back and forth that served to delay things. First one didn't want anything with the other, then the roles changed, and then it was back again to the first person moving away, until I wanted to shake them. I thought Stuart took this a bit too far.

As important as the romance was the plot, and as important as the plot was the atmosphere. The Ripper murders and the reincarnation plot (the murderer actually is the same soul that was Jack the Ripper, which periodically reincarnates in different bodies, and both Lizzie and Damien are also reincanated from people related to the original cases) are fascinating, and creepy enough, but it's the wonderfully done atmosphere that makes the book really, really chilly.

I'm not sure exactly what Silhouette Shadows books were supposed to be like (the line folded long before I started to pay attention to such things as publishers or lines), but if BTN is a good example of them, with its dark atmosphere and its interesting paranormal plot, I'm going to be looking for more of them. A B