Complicated and a little confusing
There were so many characters, so many different story lines,

The main characters felt slapped together, The romance part of the story was confusing it felt like the Author changed her mind at some point on who the love story was to be about. You never really felt connected to any one character, I realize this is book one of a new series and it was meet and greet of all the characters but it got very confusing all the different greek god and goddesses and with all the different religions thrown in I kept leaving the book and cleaning my house .. uh what? LOL , The "bad guy" was pretty boring, at this point I am not sure if I will read book 2
This was surprisingly difficult to finish. Being a lover of Sherrilyn Kenyon ,I was very saddened by this book.

I picked up this book at the library as I has seen The authors name before and the premise of demon pirates sounded interesting if not ripped off from a popular movie series...whatever lets give it a shot.
I started reading during some down time at work and it didnt take long for me to be laughing out loud...Was it funny? No, not intentionally.
I am in utter shock, but I suppose I shouldnt be really, that this is a well respected and sold author. This will be my last EVER venture into Kenyon's writing.
Not since the abomination that is twilight have I ever read such a hackneyed, pile of copy and paste word vomit.
My first impression was that a 6 year old Beast Boy (from the new Teen Titans GO cartoon) had watched a Pirates otC Marathon then tried to tell me a bed time story complete with Idiot naming, Like Devyl Bane, Mr Death (but pronounced Deeth to not me too obvious), a Beautiful Doctor named Belle Morte (beautiful Death...insert Eye Roll here) but actually its kinda hard to keep up because everyone has like 3 names.
At least the prose isnt too hackneyed right? "Nay, the sweetest music to my ears has always been the death gargle of an enemy slain at my feet as he gasps his last breath" OK then.
Everyone on the ship is undead and everyone is the most studly, manly, sexy, well endowed, meanest, but with a heart of gold, toughest SOB that ever lived.
At one point the undead studly captain Bane AKA Duel something aka Du aka 61/2 foot tall sex on a stick is shooting fireballs from his fists at a sharktopus while his merman crewman is wrestling him...Ok epic battle? nope Deus Ex Machina...the book is packed with battle scenes that you never get to really see because the author cant write action scenes and has them end with some sudden Deus Ex Machina or off screen event... and dont get me started on the Macguffins.
Oh hey the bad Girl is Ursula from little mermaid and shes pissed because she was dumped go figure and oh yeah the sudden out of no where love affair between the captain and his adversary which is a women but actually his ship too so when she gets hurt the boat starts leaking...and OMG this is just CRAP.
This cut and paste crap is aimed at Inexperienced readers/ 14 year old girls who have never read anything but YA/ People who think reality shows are awesome and sheeple.
THis is why I struggle with female authors, because instead of aspiring to be like the great ones that came before like Hobb, LeGuin, Norton etc They all want the fast buck and fame of the cut and paste, Urban fantasy, pseudo romance, Twilight, vat of word vomit... They should be ashamed of the way they set back good female authors so should their publishers and the uneducated uninspired readers that buy their weak crap.

after further contemplation and some time to think it over... it still sucked.

2.5 ***

This author is new to me, and from what I understand this isn't her best work, so I'll try another book from her.

Now before I get to why, my rating is so low, let me tell you why this might be something you'll love.

The writing is superb, the world that the author created is unique. The men are hot, and the woman are strong.

Now, my first problem was, half way through the book, I'm like who's the heroine? It was as if the author was like, yeah I don't like Cam, I'm going to go with Mara.



Which would have been fine, if we didn't get the impression from the beginning that Cam was indeed the heroine.  I mean, the book starts with her POV.



It's not that I didn't like Mara, but it was just confusing, and made the first part of the book, almost moot.



Another thing is there is so much information thrown at me, I felt like I should take notes. Like there had to be a better way to go about this.



I got it at the library so I can't complain too bad. On to the next.

As a lover of dark fantasy I expected to thoroughly enjoy this book. I came in looking for pirate fantasy and oh boy did I get so much more!

This book jams in... are you ready!

Pagan magic
Devils
Mermen
Necromancy
Druids
Tree people
Pirates
Witches
Angels
Djinn
Loa
Norse mythos
Greek mythos
Pagan mythos
Dragons
Water sprites
And ...
Lovecraftian monsters

All of this in 300 pages no less! And also 1.5 romances are crammed in.

All the male characters ooze masculinity and hotness as do all the female characters who charm with their feminine whiles.

All of these creatures have several names you will struggle to remember and will honestly have little to no impact on the story.

This book is unfortunately just a series of what I would call “random encounters” that are filler for quite a loose plot.

I’m afraid I won’t be reading the next book in the series and unless YA (over the top) fantasy (cringe) romance is your bag, then I don’t recommend you do either.

Sherrilyn Kenyon never disappoints! I'm so pumped for the sequel

Reference to a character from the Dark Hunter world that shouldn’t be there.

Thought that Cameron and Devyl were meant to be the love interests but nope, Cameron took a real quick dive to the backseat. Then her romance was super rushed and came from nowhere. It was dumb (not the romance but the way it was written).

Kenyon has an annoying tendency to not kill anyone off. Like, real annoying.

Also getting annoyed about the fact that all of her characters are always hot/gorgeous.

This book kind of sucked honestly.

I usually love Sherrilyn Kenyon's books and I love pirate books. Trying to keep track of which pirate books I've already read was the whole reason I started using GoodReads so I was very excited for this book.

I started to read Deadmen Walking without properly reading the blurb, I just skimmed the first bit because I knew I was going to get it no matter what. So I didn't know who our heroine was and I assumed the female voice I'd been reading for the first half of the book was meant to be the heroine. The POV switched between her and Devyl, and it made sense for her to be our main voice. She was new to this world and so are we as the audience, she introduces the new characters, the new mythology and how it relates to what we already know in a natural way. Then it sets up something for them to bond over. She is the beloved 5 year younger sister, determined to find out what happened to her brother. Devyl was an older brother of a girl 5 years younger whom he loved very much. She was kind to him and gave him a hug, he told her kindness is how he fell in love before, there were innuendos about sex a couple of times, he demanded she sleeps in his cabin for safety, she argued and he couldn't believe she would do so. I don't know if you guys have read as much romance as I have, but you don't need to have read a whole bunch of pirate romance to know that's how a romance in a pirate book starts.

But then it didn't.

Suddenly, half way through the book, we're just told that he's been secretly in love with this other distant character this whole time and now we're in her perspective and she's the heroine!!
wtf?
And it's like you're telling me she's been misunderstanding him for a couple of thousands of years but also supposedly the one who knows him the most intimately??
And she just straight out doesn't trust him. I was a bit frustrated with the heroine in the first dragon book but her realisations, misunderstandings were natural because they'd been separated that whole time, and she had people around her constantly giving her false information, and then after she has her realisation moment her redemption was great.
But Mara still doesn't trust him even after she had like 4 realisations realising the same thing!!
And this is all just so sudden, there was no hint at all, it's like Sherri mashed up two different books together and kept the love interest the same. I know the second book is meant to be our first heroine's book so I wonder if Sherri should have just done this book entirely with Cam's romance first and then lead on to Devyl and Mara.
It's Cam's desire to find her brother is the inciting incident for this whole book anyway. It's her brother, her blood and her new adventure. Mara and Devyl have been doing this for years, and why now is this change happening? Why in this point of time does he just stop arguing and pretending to hate her and why now is she suddenly going "wait a minute maybe he isn't so bad" what in their story changed??

Before finishing the book I was hoping that the second book featuring Cameron and Kalder would be better because it's not trying to do as much world building, however,

Spoiler

there was a short POV shift where Kalder wants to sacrifice his life for Cameron's and then just tells the audience why, listing a bunch of stuff we haven't seen. We have no emotional attatchment to their story or even him, he's had like 3 mentions in this entire book and then she comes out sobbing because she can't do this without him and us readers just don't care because their story is a complete mystery to us.

So I don't really know how their story is going to have any real stakes for us, we're going to be told how much they care about eachother and why without ever having seen it.

I'm very disappointed but I do have hope for the second book now that the series has been established. I truly love this world she's created and seeing it from a time in the past is awesome, I loved seeing more of Thorn's Hellchasers and the different kind of creatures out in the world. Hoping for some mentions in our timeline. It was also very interesting to see a near completely fictionalised mythology as apposed to ones based on greek or sumerian mythologies and Sherrilyn Kenyon did it really well. So for those reasons I'll be rating it 3 stars, as apposed to my usual rating of how much I enjoyed the book, which would place this as a 2 star book.

Chock full of new characters and new races to get straight, but beautifully still entwined in the Dark Hunter world we know and love. It was a pleasant surprise and a good read.

Wanted a bit more action and a little less character development but I guess that is to be expected with the beginning of a new series.

I will admit to being a hardcore Sherrilyn Kenyon fan. I will also admit to the fact that my love of her books has waned, slightly, over the last few years. Don't get me wrong. I love her books and I love her writing, but I got bored of the same formula: Tortured guy and (sometimes) tortured girl meet and eventually fall in love, healing the wounds of each other's past.

At the same time, I can't fault her because this works. While her novels follow a similar formula, she has the ability to make each story its own. The backstories are different, the current predicament is different but connected to her overarching story line. These facts, and amazing writing talent, are what keep me coming back again and again.

I can't get enough of her. There's a reason her books are one of the few that I've managed to re-read over the years. The woman knows how to write.

Deadmen Walking, while set in the same universe as her Dark-Hunter novels with familiar characters, is a new and fresh take on this world. Our characters are pirates and the story takes place in 1715 and 1716. I've got a soft spot for pirates (I can thank Johnny Depp and teen-Andrea for this), so I was excited about this new trilogy.

Sherrilyn doesn't introduce us to Deadmen Walking's main characters right away. We first meet Captain Paden Jack in the prologue, followed by his sister Cameron in the first chapter. Unlike her previous novels, she doesn't focus solely on our hero and heroine (Devyl and Marcelina), but allows for additional narratives, which keeps the story flowing.

Devyl and Marcelina have known each other for centuries, always at each other's throats, but unable to escape the other. I'm not going to explain too much about their relationship to avoid spoilers, but I enjoyed watching their relationship change over the course of the novel as we learned more about their pasts.

As always, Sherrilyn doesn't just create a story with her main characters but forms bonds and relationships between the secondary characters. However, these characters are anything but secondary. They all stand on their own with their own personalities, secrets, and stories to tell. While weaving her tale of Devyl and Marcelina, we are getting hints and tidbits as to what is happening with Cameron, Kalder, Thorne (those of you familiar with her Dark-Hunter series will be rather familiar with him), and others.

I'm looking forward to continuing this series with the next installment, Death Doesn't Bargain.