Night's Pleasure by Amanda Ashley

Savannah Gentry is a reporter for a local newspaper, and her father, now paralyzed, works for the same paper. But what brings them together is a love of magic, stage magic. Ever since Savannah was little and her father took her to see a stage magician named The Remarkable Renaldo, she's loved stage magic, and she's been unable to explain how he was able to do the tricks he did up on the stage.

Now she is older, but she's still following the magician who once called himself "The Remarkable Renaldo", even though he's undergone a number of name changes since then. Now, he's calling himself Santoro the Magnificent, and she still can't explain how he does his fantastic magic tricks. But after she goes to see his show, he incorporates her into his act, reading her mind and revealing one of her deepest secrets, that she had a crush on one of her teachers in high school. After the show, she waits around, but she doesn't find him that night.

She finally does a few nights later, and gets to meet the magician himself in the flesh. She asks for an interview, but he doesn't grant interviews, so instead she asks if he'll answer a few questions for her instead. He counters with an invitation to a drink in a nearby bar, and there they talk. He reveals to her his true name, Rane, and while he won't talk much about his magic, he does ask her out on a date, and she is pleased to accept.

But on the night of their date, she comes home to find her father has been murdered. He only lasts long enough to tell her that there is information she must know, and that it is in a sealed envelope in his desk. As Savannah deals with his death, she and Rane, who has told her he is a shapeshifter, become lovers. But he's lied to her. He's actually a vampire. Not as big a lie as all that... vampires do shift their shape, but much more relevant when Savannah discovers that her mother was a Vampire Hunter, and that she has now inherited her mother's mantle, along with two very special books: one listin the names of all known vampires, and another listing all the known hunters, back to the one who started it all, Abraham Van Helsing.

Van Helsing was her mother's last name before she married, and Savannah feels compelled to discover and kill whoever killed both her mother and her father. But more to the point, she discovers that Rane is a vampire himself. She confronts him with the knowledge and he freely admits it. He also tells her that he knew her mother, and that he helped her survive her first kill as a Vampire Hunter, and that she spared him for that, but promised to kill him should their paths cross again. He admired her mother for being tough.

But now someone is after Savannah for the books that are her birthright, and she can only rely on Rane and herself to keep them safe for whoever murdered her father to get them and will murder her as well to find out who all the vampires are.

But is the killer another vampire, or a werewolf, who the vampires fought against in the war that was so recently over, or someone or something else? Rane has detected the scent of both a vampire and a werewolf on her property, and he suspects whoever killed her father was a vampire- someone her father invited into his home. But who could it be? As Savannah and Rane grow ever closer, they will have to untangle a web of hatred, and foil a plot that could bring the vampires and the werewolves into open war yet again... only this time, the outcome might be very, very different.

I liked this book, and the way the relationship grows between Rane and Savannah. In addition to bringing her peace with the killer of her mother during the course of the book, Savannah does something of the same for Rane with his family, bringing him back into the fold that he left because he felt he didn't deserve their care or love.

Here, we get to see more of Mara, the ultimate progenitor of all vampires, or at least, all vampires currently living. She is so old that to drink her blood allows vampires to be able to even go outside in the sun. Sequel-bait is dangled as Mara also seems to have found a man she will be able to love for an eternity, but most of the attention in the book is focussed on Rane, Savannah and the person or persons who is/are a threat to both of them.

For a romance novel, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't particularly standout, either. It was a nice, comfortable read, but probably not anything you'll remember as deathless prose. Still, it's a good story, well-told, and thus gets a recommendation from me.