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.