Her Dark Curiosity by Megan Shepherd

Her Dark Curiosity by Megan Shepherd
Series: The Madman's Daughter #2
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Publication Date: January 28th 2014
Source: Publisher [Edelweiss]

To defeat the darkness, she must first embrace it.

Months have passed since Juliet Moreau returned to civilization after escaping her father's island—and the secrets she left behind. Now, back in London once more, she is rebuilding the life she once knew and trying to forget Dr. Moreau’s horrific legacy—though someone, or something, hasn’t forgotten her.

As people close to Juliet fall victim one by one to a murderer who leaves a macabre calling card of three clawlike slashes, Juliet fears one of her father’s creations may have also escaped the island. She is determined to find the killer before Scotland Yard does, though it means awakening sides of herself she had thought long banished, and facing loves from her past she never expected to see again.

As Juliet strives to stop a killer while searching for a serum to cure her own worsening illness, she finds herself once more in the midst of a world of scandal and danger. Her heart torn in two, past bubbling to the surface, life threatened by an obsessive killer—Juliet will be lucky to escape alive.

Before I'd even started reading Her Dark Curiosity, I started seeing a lot of negative reviews around. After every review I read, I began looking forward to this book less and less but I was still really curious to find out what was going to happen that I just had to read it. I think going into this book with low expectations actually allowed me to enjoy this book a lot me. For me, it definitely wasn't a strong as The Madman's Daughter, parts of the story were ridiculous but this book still managed to grab me.

Her Dark Curiosity picks up months after Juliet escaped from her fathers island. She has been taken in by someone from her past and is trying to re-build her life. Juliet is trying to work on a serum to cure her illness, because her father's serum will only prevent it from taking over for so long and she just wants to have a normal life. And then the murders start. Someone is killing people Juliet knows and leaving strange and familiar clawlike slashes. Juliet starts to worry that one of her fathers creations followed her to London, and she knows exactly who it is.

Her Dark Curiosity had me going back and forth between ratings when I'd finished. I found the first half to be a bit bland and boring, not much was happening and I was slowly losing interest. But then the second half kicked in and everything got exciting very quickly. 

Juliet completely lost me in this one. I really liked her character in The Madman's Daughter, but after most of the decisions she made in this one, I'm not her biggest fan anymore. She was kind of flat in this one and her stupidity made me want to shake some sense into her countless times! I actually felt kind of disturbed by some of her decisions. She completely missed some extremely obvious clues that I'd figured out chapters ago and I couldn't believe she missed them! I still like Juliet, but definitely not as much as I did in the first book.

The romance in this book was... weird and creepy and very, very strange. I'm still not a fan of the love triangle in this series, mainly because I love Montgomery and everyone else can just GTF. But, oh how I wanted to slap Juliet for some of the decisions she made regarding the romance (especially that scene in her apartment with a certain character because WTF JULIET? REALLY?). I only really cared about the scenes involving Juliet and Montgomery. I didn't enjoy the other ones.

The storyline did take a while to grab my attention, but when it did, boy was I hooked! I was desperate to find out more about The Kings Club, The Professor and Elizabeth and find out what the hell was going on in this book! I did really love Lucy's involvement in this one. Lucy is a really great and strong character and she definitely added a lot to the story. There were still a hell of a lot of twist and surprises in this book that I didn't expect (and a few that I guessed), and the creep factor was still there.

The ending is left open for the next book - WHICH IS BASED ON FRANKENSTEIN! I kind of cheered when I read the last couple of lines because I'm really looking forward to seeing Shepherd's twist on the Frankenstein story! 

Overall, I enjoyed Her Dark Curiosity, but it definitely wasn't as good as the first book. I'm looking forward to seeing what's going to happen in the next (and last book) in this series and I'm excited about the Frankenstein twist.