Night Games by Nina Bangs is set in modern day Ireland with a hero from the distant future.

Brian Byrne is man of the future.  In the world he lives in contact sports are a thing of the past having been deemed too dangerous.  There is only one sport that captures the attention of the nation and that is sex, and he is the hottest star who is wanted by every team.  He has everything he could ever want and now what he wants is a vacation in the past.

Choosing to go to the past Brian finds himself following one of the mysterious white stags into present day Ireland and to the haunted keep on a cliff top where his ancestors once lived.

Ally O'Neill is an American tourist who is travelling with her aunt around Ireland.  Her aunt is excited at the thought of seeing something supernatural in Ireland for the book she is writing.  Ally is not so sure she will find anything although her family is one of the few to have its own banshee.  Ally is also a writer and has written a number of popular books about how to be the perfect wife.  The only problem is that her perfect marriage has fallen apart and her husband has left her for another woman.  Now she is concentrating on her new book about her single life and this is when she meets the sexy Brian Byrne.

The attraction is instant but Brian has a no sex clause in his contract and Ally is a temptation he cannot afford.  He had once broken a promise and he has vowed he will never do that again for the last time he did someone had died. 

Ally's aunt Katy however sees a good match in them and has no hesitation in helping to set them up.  She is unwittingly helped in this by Ally's publisher who has decided that the book she writes should be of a certain genre and Ally enlists Brian in helping her with the sexual aspect of her book.

But no matter that they are being thrown together by some parties and events, there are others who would happily keep them apart and those other visitors from the future have no problem in intruding on Brian's vacation in order to ensure he does what they want...pity all of their agendas are different.

With a haunting sub-storyline this book has a lot of good points and at times is laugh out loud funny.  The strange assortment of visitors and gadgets from the future were very amusing.

However I also felt that there were some weaker points to it too.  For one thing I found that Brian constantly using the word "babe" got very irritating.  Now I have read a lot of books where the hero uses his term without it bothering me.  In this book however I felt that it was overused to the point of irritating and furthermore considering that the hero is from the future it seemed rather out of place.  To be perfectly honest if I had been in the heroine's place and had been called babe as many times as Ally was I would have slapped him.

I also felt that far too much was made of Brian breaking his last promise.  From what he had said about breaking his promise the actual details of it did not seem in proportion to the actual fuss he made about it.  I would have expected a conscious decision to break his word and not what was actually the case.

This book in my opinion starts off very well but goes downhill only to redeem itself with some interesting plot twists towards the end. 

In an ideal world I think that Brian would have been well suited with Fortune MacDonald from An Original Sin and then pair up Ally with Leith.  Oh well, guess we can't have it all. 

RATING : 
(if you need an explanation of the hearts ratings see my homepage)

Also by Nina Bangs: An Original Sin and The Pleasure Master

Links to  online stores