"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".

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.

In Ms Boyd's werewolf world, werewolves have lived peacefully and undetected among humans for thousands of years, and with their superior instinct and intelligence, they have ruled over an ignorant human race. If you like Anne Rice's vampires, you'll probably enjoy 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. 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.

Ms. Boyd reveals the werewolves as creatures who live within the human framework and who bolsters human society, yet lives outside it. A brother and sister with very different talents grow up together, face forbidden romance, and an eventual truth which shall tear them apart in this gripping saga packed with powerful characters and subplots. About 90% of the novel had to do with the past and Matisse and Brianna's young lives. I would have liked at least a 50-50 split here and I would have loved for Hannah to know Nicholas well enough to fall in love with him. In short, I guess I was hoping for some romance between the woman who'd lost her husband in a car accident and the man who was also a wolf, but it didn't happen. Still a very good read and if you like werewolf books I'd recommend this one.