Marked by Moonlight by Shari Kohler

Claire Morgan is a teacher, and quite a good one, but in her personality, she's always been a meek and mild mouse, afraid to do anything or be assertive because of her abusive father, who controlled her and her mother with harsh words and physical abuse since before she was born.

But when she goes out of her comfort zone and heads to the home of her student, Lenny Alvarez, because she is worried about the young man missing his SAT test, she is attacked by a feral dog and badly bitten. But the dog is shot by someone in the shadows, and she manages to escape. What she doesn't know is that the "dog" is actually Lenny, who has been turned into a werewolf by some unknown Alpha. His killer, the werewolf hunter Gideon March, finds the purse she left behind and tracks her down to her apartment, planning to kill her as well.

But his snooping into her stuff comes at a cost. When it comes time to kill her, and put her out of her misery before she can change into a werewolf, kill someone and thereby lose her soul, Gideon can't do it. She's not just some random victim, she's Claire Morgan, and he can't bring himself to destroy her. But if he wants to save her, he's first going to have to convince her of what really happened to her, and get her to agree that werewolves exist and agree to be saved. But despite his wanting to save her, he's never done this before, never even wanted to.

And the organization which backs Gideon won't like him trying to save Claire, and his sister, who wants to be in the organization so bad she can taste it, won't approve either. Especially when they realize that Gideon and Claire have become lovers, something neither would approve of. But is there really any chance to save Claire and return her to being simply human, before she loses her soul with her first kill?

Claire has to face up to some hard truths: that she's changing in ways more extreme than just her eyes turning silver and not putting up with behavior that she would have meekly accepted before. Her only chance for escape from a future hellish existence is to find the werewolf who changed Lenny and kill him before the full moon. But when one of the oldest werewolves in the world takes an interest in Claire and promises her a different way out, will she take the sure thing, or the hard road to getting what she wants? And can she even trust Marcus to have her best interests in mind?

This is Shari Kohler's first novel, but despite that, the storyline hung together well. There were no big holes in the story's logic, and nothing that forcibly drove me out of my willing suspension of disbelief. Yet, I didn't find the sex scenes between the main characters very hot at all, and the question of their attraction to each other seems to come (so to speak) from Claire being in heat for most of the book. We know that Gideon finds *her* attractive, but I found it problematic that the heroine was apparently responding to a force beyond her control.

Later on, we learn that there really *is* an attraction there for her, but during most of the novel, I felt that Gideon was taking advantage of her being in heat when he had sex with her. This was more of a niggle than an outright problem because he clearly refrains at first, not wanting to force her, and she practically has to beg him to make love to her. But still, labelling what she was feeling as basically a hormonal reaction made me a bit uncomfortable when it came to the sex. Yes, this was wiped out later, but it did blunt some of my enjoyment of the story as I was reading it.

Nevertheless, I would still recommend this novel to those who enjoy paranormal romance, but for a paranormal romance, it never really rose above middle of the road for me. It just didn't have the sexy heat I have come to look for in my romances.