Private Demon by Lynn Viehl

Jema Shaw's father was an archaeologist who died in Greece, searching for his dream. Her mother was a victim of the search, nearly crushed in a cave collapse and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Jema is not in great health herself, because she's been suffering from Juvenile Diabetes and, being nearly 30, isn't expected to live much longer.

Valentin Jaus, who owns the house next door to Jema, is Darkyn, and hopelessly in love with her. But mindful of her frailty, his only gesture of how he feels towards her is sending her lovely Camellias every year on her birthday. They occasionally meet and walk together, but his reluctance to tell her how he feels means that their meetings consist of stilted talking and lots of silent walking together.

Jema works in the private museum that houses the many artifacts that her father uncovered and brought back from Greece and Italy. But now concerns have come up that her father may have "salted" some of the sites he worked with artifacts, and Jema is working hard to disprove that assertion. Also, she volunteers her time with the local police as a forensic investigator. That is how she meets Thierry Durand, who has run away from the house of Michael Cyprien, unable to deal with his betrayal by his dead wife. But he's come to Chicago to seek vengeance on the men who nearly burned Luisa to death. But when he encounters Jema Shaw, he is both entranced and attracted to her.

Thierry's ability is to see into and travel into the dreams of others allows him to understand Jema Shaw, but when she enters his own nightmares, will her understanding of him lead her to reject him or will she understand and embrace the choices he's made? Because someone wants Jema dead, and Thierry is going to have to fight for her from Valentin, the other Darkyn who wants her for his Sygkenis. But something about Jema is also of interest to the Brethren, and they won't take kindly to the Darkyn's interest in her.

I had read "Twilight Fall" before this book, so I already sort of knew the outcome of the contest between Thierry and Valentin for Jema's hand, but that was only a small codicil to the rest of the story. So many of the female characters in the Darkyn books were orphans, but here we finally get to see a female heroine with a real mother, and naturally, the mother is a flaming bitch. Is it too much to ask that the heroine have had a loving mother at some point?

Basically, Jema's mother exists to bitch and moan at her, and provide another foe later on, when it is revealed that the mother wants her to die so she can claim all her deceased husband's money, and that she's been working with the live-in family physician to kill Jema off. There's more to it than that, but Jema's mother embodies all the worst aspects of the mother-in-law in fairy tales, to the point of being murderous to her own daughter. It got to the point where I almost saw it as parody.

I found this to be my least favorite of the Darkyn books, and it was primarily for the portrayal of Jema's mother as a bitchy harridan who could treat her daughter like a useless appendage that was better off dead and gone. Yes, I realize such people exist in the real world, but the experience of reading it made the book distasteful to me. It just seems like too many female characters in books I see are either orphans who don't know their parents or they have nasty, horrible, controlling parents. Now, I realize that's a common theme in YA novels to have a reason for the protagonist to separate from her family and find out who she is on her own, but I find it tiresome in the extreme in adult novels.

Read this novel only to be a completeist for the Darkyn series, I don't recommend it as an introduction to the series or on its own.