Review: violent, sexy and occasionally violently sexy
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 30, 2014
Our heroine, Hope (Esperanza) is not an Anna, I’m pretty sure timid is not in her vocabulary, which I love. I am so tired of shy little virgin chicks who are too dumb to tie their own shoes. It’s refreshing to read about someone who is different. Now our hero, Enrique, he was pretty hot. I pretty much loved Hope throughout the entire story, but Enrique was harder to love. I have at least three separate notes on how this thing with Lia has to end. I tell you I’m possessive of my leading men. I wanted him to be more wrapped up in Hope and willing to tell her. Thankfully, he does redeem himself in the end.Blood Slave starts out graphic and then keeps it up for most of the book. Just a warning there is a f/f scene and a m/f/f scene, for those of you that aren’t into reading that kind of thing. I’ll admit they aren’t necessarily my cup of tea. I like my heroes to be a bit demented, but to only have eyes for our heroine when it comes to the bedroom. We read about Hope and Enrique having some sweet bedroom moments, but those are in passing, the only ones we see actually see are rough and kind of violent. That’s the best way to describe it. Rough is good, but I need a little sweet at some point too.  In a few ways, Blood Slave reminded me of French Quarter, mostly erotic literature. The big difference, Blood Slave actually has a plot.Blood Slave touches on quite a few darker side elements.  While we didn’t get into it much I thought Travis did a really great job of giving us the feel of the seedy underworld hiding just below the surface. The story is based in New York but has dealings with the Colombian drug cartels.Up until somewhere around 60% I wasn’t so sure I loved this book, I continued to go back and forth, it was mostly my disappointment in Enrique. The action does pick up and I found I was really enjoying myself and things started to get interesting. It took us a while to build up to the angsty parts, but we get there.  Blood Slave would have been an easy 4.5 for me if we would have had more torture.  Well we needed more torture and I would have liked to see Enrique be a little more mushy earlier on. I didn’t care what Lia’s sad sob story was, he should have dropped her and moved on with Hope asap.In a way this story has a slight Pretty Woman feel to it. Prostitute turned glam kind of thing. Pretty Woman, but add in drugs, violence, vampires and graphic sex. What more do you need? I’ll definitely be reading the other Nightlife books in the series.