Review: Who are we supposed to be rooting for again?
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 21, 2011
In this vampire themed romance, you'll find the usual cast of characters with a bit of a twist. I mean, how often is the main female character physically stronger than her male counterpart in one of these little romances? Hmmmm... not often. But then again, I think on average that's something that women like in a romance novel - especially when it comes to vampires. After all, who wants to read about the woman carrying the man over the threshold, right? Not too sexy.***Spoilers... but it's a short story, so it just can't be helped***In this short (but not too short) novella, the lovely Marise makes her way back to a home that she hasn't set foot in in over 50 years. The reason? Because the love of her life cheated on her with his sire - or so he thought at the time. *mental pause* Now, I'm certainly not condoning being unfaithful, but 50 years seems a bit extreme... but hey, I'm only human, right? 50 years to me is like... a lifetime.So, anyway, back to the story. Marise comes back out of duty, since there appears to be a GMO vampire hunter on the loose. He's already killed two guards, mortally wounded another one, and injured the head honcho... so he has to die, of course - and being the Wyatt Earp of the Venia bloodline, Marise gets saddled with the job.Upon arrival, Marise finds out that her ex-lover, Jascha, is the mortally wounded guard (as if we didn't see that coming). According to the Venia leader, Jascha was injured so badly that "they feared he may not recover". What I find a bit unbelievable and slightly annoying is that the description of his wounds hardly seem deadly. As you read on it literally takes Marise a brief encounter to stitch him up and tend to his wounds enough that he can talk and walk around again. Soooo... yeah. Not so much.Another wonderful tidbit is that despite the fact that Marise is "four times older" than Jascha (we're never really given an exact age, mind you, but it's at the very least 200 years old) she doesn't know a lick of Russian. She lives there, has had a Russian lover, and just doesn't feel like learning it... because she enjoys being ignorant and uneducated. Lovely - she sounds like a real winner.There's also a disturbing scene towards the end where Jascha casually talks to a woman, then proceeds to attack her and drink her dry. During this, Marise describes how sexy she thinks this is and how turned on she gets when Jascha murders people... to the point that they just have to go at it like bunny rabbits right next to the corpse. Yeah, Um... I'm going to label this scene "Romance Fail". Next thing you know, F E Heaton will be incorporating necrophilia and blood-flavored lubricant.... so let's go ahead and nip this in the bud, shall we?The big confession, and resulting make-up was a big build up with not a whole lot of pay-off. Jascha's sorry he slept with Almina, his sire; Marise finally tells him that she's his real sire, not Almina. Oh good, let's get naked.  Conflict resolution complete!***End Spoilers***In the final chapter, the author introduces about ten new characters with way too much information for the end of a novella, then ends the book abruptly on a dramatic note that screams "please buy my next book". Instead of it feeling like a smooth transition, it almost makes you feel like you still have more story to read... either that, or just a feeling of "Huh?"All in all, the book really wasn't as bad as I made it sound, but then again, it wasn't really good either. There were just too many inconsistencies for my taste buds, and a few too many spelling and grammatical errors for my patience.P.S. Who are we supposed to be cheering for? The vampires that murder people remorselessly, or the human that's been genetically altered in a way that evens up the playing field? If you ask me, I think I'm going to root for the human.... sounds like these vampires are a-holes.