Review: Good but WAY too short
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 21, 2012
Vampire Dawn is another fun entry into the world of Samantha Moon, mother and private detective but it's very VERY short.  Despite its brevity, Rain packs a good amount of story into this one.  Not only is Samantha's humanity more rapidly slipping away but she's also noticing that the aid she gave to her son last year is changing him in ways she's not sure how to handle.  He's getting stronger and faster, healing more quickly.  Is he becoming what she hates most about herself?The meat of the story, or the main case, revolves around a series of serial murders and disappearances.  People have been disappearing and found in the mountains drained of blood.  Samantha helps Detective Sherbet in finding the culprit behind the brutal murders.  What's probably more interesting than the actual case is how the supporting characters are tied and affected by their involvement.  Sherbet is closely tied to Samantha now and is now getting to know what it's like to be in her head.  Literally.  Samantha is a psychic supernatural creature of the night and Sherbet finds out the hard way what it's like to be so close to her.  In addition, the case of the disappearing/bloodless victims sheds some new light on Detective Hanner.Not one to fear changing the status quo, JR Rain throws another loop into Samantha's life in the form of the emerald amulet she found in Christmas Moon.  What are it's powers and how will they change Samantha going forward?My one real knock on the story is how short it is.  By the time I hit 65% completed on my kindle it was over.  I was hoping some more time would have been spent on Samantha's only other vampire companion, Detective Hanner as well as an appearance from her guardian angel that showed up in Christmas Moon.  While Hanner makes a small cameo, the guardian angel is nowhere to be found.  Danny her lowlife ex makes an appearance as does Archibald Maximus and Kingsley and Fang and some interesting ideas are made on most of those fronts but they're not focused on for too long.  For those who haven't read it, Christmas Moon IS included at the very end so it would be  best to skip to that and read it first if you haven't already.Despite its short length it's still a good story in the series and as always it's a fun read.  There is no shortage of plot threads for JR Rain to write about in the future so he's left me wanting more without a doubt.