No Mercy – Sherrilyn Kenyon

Dark Hunter
18

Live fast, fight hard and if you have to die then take as many of your enemies with you as you can. That is the Amazon credo and it was one Samia lived and died by. Now in contemporary New Orleans, the immortal Amazon warrior is about to learn that there’s a worse evil coming to slaughter mankind than she’s ever faced before. Shapeshifter Dev Peltier has stood guard at the front of Sanctuary for almost two hundred years and in that time, he’s seen it all. Or so he thought. Now their enemies have discovered a new source of power- one that makes a mockery of anything faced to date. The war is on and Dev and Sam are guarding ground zero. But in order to win, they will have to break the most cardinal of all rules and pray it doesn’t unravel the universe as we know it.

Welcome back all, I’ve mostly recovered from being sick so thankfully this one will go up on time for you! This week we are looking at Sam and Dev’s relationship.

The best thing for me about this book is learning more about the Amazons. Pretty much all I knew about them was that they were tribes that were only female, when they wanted to get pregnant they’d kidnap or find men to get pregnant, and if they birthed boys then they gave them to their fathers and kept the girls. As soon as I found out that this book was focusing on a Dark Hunter and a Were-Hunter I had to wonder how it would work…. Or even what kind of battle would play out.

To be completely honest the parts of this story that really stand out in my memory are the scene where Dev first sees Sam getting off her bike, coz you know, a woman in full skin tight leather getting off of a motorbike all sexy like and shaking her hair out once the helmet comes off is kinda hard to ignore. After that I honestly don’t remember why they end up having to find Hippolyta’s treasured something. It was like a piece of chest armour or something.

Anyway they end up with a riddle somehow (sorry guys, I don’t know if the book just wasn’t that memorable or if it’s coz I’ve only read this one a couple of times, rather than the 5+ time’s I’ve read most of the others) that they need to solve to let them into some specific kind of world where they can fight to win the prize.

And cue the awesome fight scenes. There are wolves while the earth is falling apart, then there’s flying monkey’s with axe’s, a sandstorm and finally a cheating guard/ goddess that they have to get through to win the prize. The fight sequence of scenes grabbed my attention because with standard Sherrilyn style it’s adrenaline pumping and grips you all the way wondering if our heroes are going to die.

When we get to the final challenge I’m left wondering how Sam can possibly pull this off. I mean, we know she’s part of the “Dogs of War” ultimate group of Dark Hunters (FYI this is a group of fighters so mean and so powerful that even in the presence of other Dark Hunters their powers don’t diminish to a noticeable level, or if they do they don’t care and so are still super deadly) so she must be pretty awesome when it comes to fighting. But this is an obstacle course. That’s all about speed, agility and stamina not brute force and determination. But it turns out this obstacle course is a bit different as it includes archery, trickery (well on the guards side not Sam’s) and swordsmanship on top of giant flying birds.

It really felt the whole way through this that the romance between Dev and Sam was secondary. It never really felt like they were fighting for each other, or struggling to come to terms with their emotions and what that means. Other than Sam obviously killing Daimons because they killed her husband and child. She was still getting past that. So in terms of this being a book to read for action scenes, yes it’s super cool. If you want the romance, it’s a little bit lacking. But it does set you up to know some newish characters a bit better for future books. So it’s still worth the read, but it’s a little weaker than some of the others.