BookHounds

MY THOUGHTSLOVED IT***slight spoilers***Kate Bradley has strange dreams that seem to occur at the same time each year, but after her parents passed, she finds them recurring constantly. The strange thing about the dreams is that they seem so real and are about the same thing,her own death and a man that seems to possess her love and she returns the affection. After she catches her fiance with another women, she runs away from her teaching job as a choir director in Reno and returns home to San Diego to sell her parents' house. She goes to church where she meets a handsome man that she feels an immediate connection to and they keep meeting in different places. The man is Calisto Terana and she has been dreaming about him for years, but she just doesn't realize it yet.Calisto is a Night Walker, a shape shifting vampire that has a heart and he has waited for centuries for his one true love to come back to him. Kate is that love and she is physically marked for Calisto to find. Calisto is a former Catholic priest and the Church knows of his existence and wants to exterminate his kind as an abomination. This in turn puts Kate in danger and Calisto must protect her from harm. There is a lot of mixed metaphors and bits of Native American lore woven through. Rather than rely on a typical vampire romance, Kessler brings in a new twist through the use of reincarnation of Calisto's true love, Tala.The story is told via flashbacks to the 1770's and I really enjoyed the historical California aspect of this. Those chapters that showed Tala and Gregorio (Calisto) as lovers were my favorite in the whole book. Calisto really reminded me of Ricardo Montablan who had a lot of girls my age crushing in our tween years. Kate was likable, but at times I wanted to shake her and have her move on with her life. I was glad she finally got it together by the end of the book. Overall, this is a promising start to a series by a new to me writer and I look forward to another one in the series.