I'd heard lots of good things about Maya Banks and her KGI series, but it was a case of never getting around to reading any of her work, even though I intended to. So since I was wanting to read a good romantic suspense and find a new author to add to my small clutch of favorites, I decided I was finally going to give the KGI series a chance. 
 I've started and put down quite a few books lately, but only a few pages into The Darkest Hour, I knew this book would have to take a drastic turn for the worse to make me put it down. With a plot centering around a man finding out that his wife who he'd been mourning for a year was alive and being kept prisoner in South America, following her rescue and then their attempt at picking up their life, while the person responsible for the wife's apparent death was still after her, and the hero keeping a secret that could destroy their relationship... well, this wasn't going to a light read. 
 The intensity from the very first pages was awe-inspiring, and it never let up for the entire book. The characters were rendered so well you couldn't help but feel for them. In the case of the hero, Ethan, he'd made some mistakes that had burned him deeply, but was determined to act like everything was fine, that everything would be fine. Until it wasn't anymore and he had no choice but to deal with the fallout. 
 For the heroine, Rachel, though she'd literally been through hell, lived through unimaginable horror that would break most people, and while she saw herself as weak and weepy and unable to cope, there was actually a quiet strength about her that was very believable. 
 And all of this was propped up by the formidable Kelly family, who had their own minor stories going on in the background. Maya Banks started the KGI series off with a bang, and I can only hope that the rest of the series (of which there are something like ten books) is just as good. I'll be getting my hands on the next couple shortly, and am really looking forward to seeing where things with the Kelly family takes us. 
 If the rest are as good as this first one, then I'll have found another auto-buy author to add to my small list of favorites. For people who love intense romantic suspense, I would definitely recommend The Darkest Hour.