Mortal Fire by C. F. Dunn

My Thoughts:
C.F. Dunn has a seductively elegant way with words.  In Mortal Fire, she slowly engages your senses like a cat lazily toying with it's prey.  You can almost feel a chill in the air and taste the tension as you turn the pages faster and faster.  I detected a bit of Twilight (yes, I'm a fan of the books) but this series is geared to a more intellectual crowd.  Lucky for me that I fit into both categories.  Dr. Emma D'Eresby is on a quest to find a a seventeenth century journal.  It's become an obsession of sorts for which she is willing to sacrifice almost everything.  Before she can get her hands on the journal she encounters some very interesting and, dare I say, potentially dangerous characters.  Dr. Matthew Lynes is appealing in every sense of the word but also mysteriously distant.  He has secrets, that's for certain.  Then, there is Kort Staahl- sinister, cunning, and chilling.  What secrets does he possess?   Is there a connection between these men and the women that are being attacked on campus?  Emma begins to fear for her life while at the same she is swept into the arms of a man she truly doesn't know.  Is he her night in shining armor or something much darker?  I was breathless at the end of Mortal Fire.  It's the first book in The Secret of the Journal series and the end will have you begging for more.  History, secrets, love and suspense are all cleverly constructed pieces in Mortal Fire that fit together beautifully.  

Read Chapters 1 and 2 HERE.
Watch the Video Trailer HERE.

More about Mortal Fire:

Twenty-nine-year-old, independent, and self-assured Cambridge history professor Emma D'Eresby has one obsession in life: the curious journal of a seventeenth-century Englishman, a portion of which was left to her by her late grandfather.
When an unexpected opportunity to study the journal in its entirety presents itself, Emma finds herself leaving Cambridge to take up a year-long position at a prestigious university in Maine. Anticipating a quiet year of research, Emma quickly discovers her work impeded by a range of unforeseen complications. From the start, there is the well-intentioned matchmaking of her vivacious Russian colleague, Elena Smalova, and the unexpected jailing of one of her post-graduate students. More troublesome, however, are the unsolved, brutal night attacks on women near the university and Emma's suspicion that they might be linked to the sinister English professor, Kort Staahl. But, most diverting and disconcerting of all, is Emma's growing attraction to the strikingly handsome Dr. Matthew Lyons, whose kind but deliberately distant demeanor puzzles her.

Suspense and dread mount when Kort begins to take a persistent and unsettling interest in Emma. What are Kort's intentions, and what is he capable of? And the mystery surrounding Matthew only deepens when Emma discovers a link between him and the journal. What is Matthew trying to hide?

*I was given a copy of Mortal Fire by Kregel Publications in exchange for my honest opinion.  No other compensation was received.*