Lucas and Amy share a psychic gift—a gift that could put them in mortal danger. And as they share night after night of savage passion, as a shadowy government conspiracy tracks their every move, they will fight to save each other. But only with their powers of second sight can they escape the terror of a perfect darkness.
Comment: This is another PNR book which has been in the pile for years. If my notes are correct, since 2010...
In this story we meet Amy Shane, a young woman who works with computers and who happens to have the ability to see people's "glow". This means she can more or less understand when someone is being truthful or lying, when someone is actually angry or mean when facial features seem fine and so on. This means she prefers solitude and the lightness of not having to deal with others' issues. She has also been having some dreams with a stranger and that is why she is so incredibly surprised when, one night, that stranger, Lucas is his name, shows up at her house, apparently to help and protect her, but in the process of explaining they are both Offspring, he is kidnapped.
This leads Amy to seek answers and what she finds out reveals she is part of a secret group of people with special powers. While still debating on this new situation, the only thing she knows she has to do is to help save Lucas, but her life is certainly going to radically change...
I think this PNR follows a pretty similar style of many other stories in the genre, which were published in those years (early 2000s, more or less) and I admit I didn't have higher expectations than that. Still, I was quite taken with the story in the beginning, because having Amy being introduced as a quiet person who preferred to stay home instead of clubbing, let's say, made me like her right away. It was also interesting she had this guy she dreamed of but that she thought was only the product of her imagination and I foresaw a romance that could be amazing if they were to discover each other in "real life".
However, from that early moment the story starts to become developed, I started losing interest. It's not that the writing is bad, it's actually fluid and easy, but the secondary characters didn't really win me over and the plot was heavily centered on the main characters helping Lucas. The reader very slowly learns about the Offspring, which means some of the information feels as if it was being held on purpose and that made it seem some things were dragging a bit.
With time and experience, I can now say i'd have appreciated this story more if the world of the Offspring had been a more easily established one, or if this story had been about Amy finding out she is part of them without the whole "battling the enemy" at the same time. Depending on how something is presented, I feel I had no patience for the constant going forward and backward on knowing important information about what was going on and having the characters have successes and not from time to time. I understand this is the style of the time but it's no longer really appealing.
Thankfully, the author didn't add unlikely sex scenes in inconvenient moments but the intimacy between Amy and Lucas wasn't enough to convince me of their bond. It's all a bit superficial. I'd have liked this more if they had recognized each other but were still realistic enough to assume the other wasn't just there because... since they were into each other in dreams and in real life that was quickly continued, I felt there was no real emotional tension to overcome. It's nice they didn't pretend what they knew about the other but their romance didn't wow me either.
As the story progresses, we get to learn more the Offspring, people who have special talents/powers and how they came to exist. The explanation isn't much worse than so many other PNR worlds out there, but the fixation on the bad guys wanting to catch them to force them to use their powers and so on quickly bored me and I did skip a few of the pages where the POV was from a bad guy.
As I see, there are several more books about this world, featuring secondary characters and possibly some which were not introduced yet. I don't feel invested enough to keep up and, in part, the reason is because of how dull the world seems to be. I know that this is a matter of opinion (I might sound unfair) and the same style did work in other books I've read 10 or 15 years ago, but... we change but even with that aside, some stories just grab you more fiercely than others. This one has good bases and ideas but the development just didn't captivate.
Grade: 5/10
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