Title: Archangel’s Blade
Author: Nalini Singh
Series: Guild Hunter, #4
Genres: Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Berkley (Imprint of Penguin)
Date Published: September 6th, 2011
Edition: Paperback
Rating:
The severed head marked by a distinctive tattoo on its cheek should have been a Guild case, but dark instincts honed over hundreds of years of life compel the vampire Dmitri to take control. There is something twisted about this death, something that whispers of centuries long past…but Dmitri’s need to discover the truth is nothing to the vicious strength of his response to the hunter assigned to decipher the tattoo.
Savaged in a brutal attack that almost killed her, Honor is nowhere near ready to come face to face with the seductive vampire who is an archangel’s right hand, and who wears his cruelty as boldly as his lethal sensuality…the same vampire who has been her secret obsession since the day she was old enough to understand the inexplicable, violent emotions he aroused in her.
As desire turns into a dangerous compulsion that might destroy them both, it becomes clear the past will not stay buried. Something is hunting…and it will not stop until it brings a blood-soaked nightmare to life once more…
My Review:
In Archangel’s Blade we step out of Elena’s point of view, and jump into Dmitri’s world. Dmitri is Raphael’s second in command to The Seven (a group of seven powerful vampires and angels who have pledged allegiance to Raphael). Archangel’s Blade also changes in the sense that we are now looking more at a Paranormal Romance than an Urban Fantasy. We get continuous back and forth point of views from both Dmitri as well as Honor, the primary focus of the story is the romance between them, and they get their HEA by the end of the book. So this is a turning point in the series as far as that goes. I don’t know if it’s Nalini’s plan to make the following books about each of the Seven, but I’m kind of hoping so! Although I’m not usually a fan of a series transitioning from UF –> PNR or vice versa, I think she did well in this particular transition and I also think that it makes sense to move onto Raphael’s Seven. It doesn’t seem random and out of place, but more of a way to round out the world she’s created.
Dmitri is a dark and very tortured soul. As we delve into his inner workings and the tragedies he’s had in his very long life, it becomes very clear why he is the way he is. He has had some tremendous challenges and your heart will truly break for him in this book. The same goes for Honor. She has gone through some incredibly impossible situations that would break anyone else. So this book is sort of heavy as far as emotion goes. I didn’t necessarily cry and I wasn’t even close to it, but what I mean is that the pasts of both Dmitri and Honor are very much tragic, so reading about them is kind of hard to swallow at times.
But because of their tough lives, this is where Dmitri and Honor are able to find common ground. I wasn’t quite sure how Nalini would pair up Dmitri because he is a very hard man and can be a difficult person to relate to. But I thought she did well pairing him with Honor. At first I didn’t really see what they would see in each other, but as the book went on, it became more and more clear how much they were perfect for each other.
The one thing I will say that I didn’t like was it seemed like Dmitri fell a little too fast for Honor. This is sort of justified at the end of the book, but at the same time I interpreted him as being a very tough man when it comes to opening up. But it almost seemed like as soon as Honor came into the picture he became a completely different person. So I think the transition there could’ve been a little smoother, but over time I sort of forgot about that anyways and really enjoyed reading about their relationship.
Overall, this was another great Guild Hunter novel. Although she seems to be transitioning these to Paranormal Romance from Urban Fantasy, I think that she’s done a great job with it. Being that she has the Psy-Changeling series under her belt, perhaps that’s why the transition didn’t seem so harsh. But I’m excited to see what the next book brings us. It seemed to me that Dmitri and Honor’s story pretty much wrapped up in this one (as with most PNRs), so I’m hoping we’ll get another one of the Seven next — preferably Venom and the person I’m pretty sure he’ll end up with based on the events in this book. 
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