Midnight Hunter by Brianna Hale

Sweet lord of all that is erotic in this world… I have been bestowed a gift.  Brianna Hale’s Midnight Hunter is the stuff of dreams.  She will awaken every deep, dark fantasy you’ve ever had—even those had late at night when it crosses your mind and you blush despite the fact that you’re alone.  She will bring forth fantasies you never knew you even had and then suddenly they’re all you can think about.  They consume you.

This is more than a book.  This is a walk into a world where you will never again be the person you were before Midnight Hunter came into your life.  This is a tale of forbidden love, of enemies and traitors, of war.

The year is 1963 and Evony wants nothing more than to finally escape East Berlin and find a new life in the West, but when her group’s plans are interrupted by the police and she witnesses her best friend being shot in the head she realizes that her dreams are futile.  She tries to flee but she’s captured by the intimidating Reinhardt Volker, East Berlin’s most dangerous man.  She’s ready to be interrogated and imprisoned, terrified of it, but ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for her dreams.  But Volker doesn’t take her to the prison.  He takes her home to his apartment.  Now she’s a prisoner in a different way, a way that she’s sure is worse and a way she doesn’t completely understand. As time goes on and she gets to know Volker, and experiences what it’s like to be the focus of his passion, she finds it harder and harder to hate the man who has ruined so many lives… and considers her a traitor to her country.

Brianna Hale’s writing style is electrifying.  She makes you not only visualize her character’s emotions, but feel them yourself.  There were so many times while reading that I felt Evony’s shame and disgust with herself for feeling anything other than total hate for her enemy.  Then there were times that I empathized with Reinhardt for making terrible, difficult decisions that many have never had to make, including myself.  I cannot stress how positively wonderful it is to read a work that makes you forget you’re actually reading because you feel like you’re there… right between the pages, experiencing the action and pain.

Reinhardt is a beautiful, troubled creature.  I despised him the first time we are introduced to him.  I wanted him to pay for the things he had done to Evony, to her friends, to her family.  I couldn’t fathom that I would continue reading this book and feel the things for him that I inevitably felt, but Evony couldn’t imagine that either and yet… it happened.  He became more than his actions, more than his past.  But they say that hate and love are actually quite similar emotions and I can see that 100% in this story.  Eventually the hate that I felt bled into a deeper, more complex emotion and by the end I was no longer confused, but positively in love with the man.

Evony is everything you would expect a woman in her position to be.  She’s terrified of what’s will become of her, mystified by what’s happening to her, and angry at the man she blames for everything terrible that has come her way.  But she’s also strong and courageous in a way that not many woman in her situation would be.  She despises the evil man who has taken her prisoner and refuses to let her leave—or even take her to prison—but is utterly confused by his pride in her inability to give in or back down.  Watching her struggle to come to terms with her feelings for her captor was moving and completely realistic (which is something I was worried about—the believability of her feelings given how much even I hated Reinhardt).

All told this book is an amazing, deeply erotic read.  It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, of course.  It’s a complicated read that will elicit emotions you might never have wanted a romance novel to unleash, but in the end you feel almost as though you’re drunk on the passion and heat that flares almost violently between Reinhardt and Evony.  This will be an absolute favorite of those who seek out one of my favorite plot types: love/hate relationships.

I reviewed another one of Brianna Hale's books a while back Soft Limits, a Daddy/Dom story with plenty of erotic adventures itself.  You can review that review here if you'd like.