Description:

"I saw the only woman I ever loved almost destroyed by my secrets. But it was the telling of them, in the end, that brought her to ruin."

From the journals of Matise Devoncroix

Hannah Braselton North has abandoned civilization to spend her life in the Alaskan wilderness. And now she holds in her hands the supposed "memoirs" of one Matise Devoncroix. It is a story of strange desires and forbidden love--the tale of a magnificent hidden race and a tortured, doomed relationship. And it is somehow connected to the critically injured male wolf Hannah pulled from the same airplane wreckage in which she discovered the diary.

But the deeper she delves into Devoncroix's story--and the stronger her recovering "patient" becomes--the more the sad, reclusive scientist realizes that what she is reading is no mere fiction. The world's true rulers have been revealed to her: fierce, strong, beautiful, and sensual creatures who have long dominated civilization in secret. The burned and bloody wolf she has taken into her small cabin is one of them: a living relation of the tragic Matise, Nicholas Devoncroix. And as his broken body mends, his awesome powers of attraction strengthen as well--as do his memories and his rage...and his lust for vengeance.

Amazon.com Review

A scintillating sequel to The Passion, Donna Boyd continues to weave the erotic and deeply intriguing tale of the Devoncroix dynasty.

In Boyd's 1990s modern world, werewolves have lived peacefully (and covertly) amongst humans for thousands of years, and with their superior instinct and intelligence, they have ruled over an ignorant human race. (If you're a fan of Anne Rice's vampires, you'll love Boyd's sensuous werewolves). In The Promise, one of the most influential pack leaders, Alexander Devoncroix, has been murdered. His controversial son, Nicholas, has new plans. Nicholas believes that the werewolves' tie to humans degrades their species, contaminating them like poison. He wants werewolves to part from humans and to form separate factions--an edict opposed by his late father. However, on a flight into the north of Alaska, his helicopter is downed by an undetected bomb. He crashes in the same area where Hannah Braselton North has chosen to live. She has abandoned civilization to spend her life living in the wild. She finds Nicholas in werewolf form, burned and maimed, and nurses him back to health. Amid the wreckage she also finds a book of memoirs, and it's through this book that the history of the Devoncroix family is revealed and Nicholas's plans put in jeopardy.

Complete with wolves howling at a full moon and passionate interludes between human and wolf, no werewolf lover should miss this extraordinary tale. --Samantha Allen Storey

From Publishers Weekly

The full moon glows as Boyd follows The Passion with a second chronicle about the Devoncroix pack, chieftains of a hidden race of werewolves secretly responsible for nearly every advancement in human civilization. Bereaved Hannah North has come to the remote Alaskan wilderness to mourn the death of her husband when she rescues a mortally injured male wolf from a helicopter crash. A hardbound book that she finds in the wreckage, which turn out to be the memoirs of Matise Devoncroix, reveals to Hannah that the stunning creature she has saved is Nicholas, heir to the recently assassinated Alexander Devoncroix, leader of all the werewolves. Nicholas, however, bitterly opposes Alexander's dream of peaceable werewolf-human coexistence. Hannah's efforts to save Nicholas, presently trapped in wolf form, counterpoint Matise's eerily hypnotic account of his own loving and vengeful relationship with Brianna, a powerful young female werewolf unable to change from human to lupine form. Matise's book also includes his reflections on the mingled history of werewolves and the humans they originally kept as beasts of burden, a symbiosis marred by the human proclivity for violence and treachery. Boyd's elegant, aristocratic werewolves are more convincing than her brutish humans, and her constant shifts between Hannah's narrative and Matise's memoirs can be creaky, but she makes the esoteric werewolf culture consistently and appealingly exotic, witty and sexy. Redolent with heightened olfactory imagery, this heady exploration of interspecies contact and uneasy accommodation should open the door to a whole litter of sequels. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.