Rating: 
Summary: Needs Better Editing
Review: TWILIGHT HUNGER is an interesting story, but the author's habitual use of one particular phrase drove me to distraction. God, I hate it when she does that. God, I wish she'd stop. God, what's going on here? It seemed like in every paragraph she had a "God, ...." phrase. On some pages, it literally *is* every paragraph, at least once. If you took out all of those "God," and just capitalized the first letter in the word after the comma, it would work just fine. Apparently every single character in her book thinks or talks like that, from the very old gypsy vampiress to the young private investigator chick. Highly, highly annoying. Obviously, the phrasing made an impression upon me. It was bad enough that I read the end of the book to see if I really wanted to plod through that annoyance. I did finish the book eventually, but the book is easy to put down and quite predictable. I'm not impressed with this woman's writing style, but I may give her another chance because reviews seem to indicate her other books were better.
Rating:
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: While the latest from Maggie Shayne is certainly original, it lacks the passion that her earlier novels have. As someone mentioned earlier, this is less a romance than a fiction novel, and perhaps that's why I was so disappointed. The secondary characters have nearly as much "page time" as the main characters, and the result is a basic lack of development. I just couldn't bring myself to care about Dante and Morgan- partially because the novel didn't facilitate it, and partially because the characters just aren't very sympathetic. The hero is, frankly, far too brutal, and the heroine is too self-absorbed, unethical, and just plain pathetic. It seems to me that Ms. Shayne is trying to edge her way into straight fiction with "Twilight Hunger"(and her recent "The Gingerbread Man"), but it's just not what she does best.
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