Review: Hot Vampires? Check. Deliciously Damaged Main Character? Check.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 28, 2013
*Actual rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars*"My mother must have suspected what my life would be like. That's the only reason I can think of why she named me Esperanza de Salvador. Hope for Salvation. There's been little hope of that since the beginning of my illustrious career as an escort at the age of fourteen.I have often thought I should change my name to something more sitting. `Damned for all eternity' or `Swims in the lake of fire.'"Oh yeah, it's a hooker with a heart of gold sort of a tale. Boy was I looking forward to reading this thanks to that quote!Firstly, I had to get used to the structure of this book. The author tends to drop words from the start of the sentence which at first makes you think it needs an edit. Once you realise that it is to help you get inside the mind of the main character though, it really does reel you in. You start to live and breathe through this character.At times I felt it was blatantly obvious that the female main character was written by a man with all her brutally honest thoughts, but it also works, after all, she's a hooker who was sold by her Columbian father into the trade. You'd certainly have to man up a bit in that case. The male perspective also comes into the limelight during the sex scenes. If you are looking for fluffy vanilla erotica here then you'd better walk away. This is more porn on paper than hyped up Mills and Boon. (Thank goodness!) Some of the sex scenes are hard to read, yet they are still engaging and I really take my hat off to the author for including such a variety of sex in this book. And for making paper porn work. *fans herself*So the main character is a hooker with a typically nasty pimp holding her visa over her head in order to make her work for him. One night she gets a visit from a bi-sexual vampire (although at the time she had no idea the woman was a vampire). Things are fine (and the sex scenes are particularly racy here) until the vampire realises that Hope (her Americanized version of her name, Esperanza) cannot be glamoured because she is telepathic. She promptly takes Hope home to meet her daddy vampire and here's where the story really starts. It turns out Hope saves herself by being telepathic and sets about working for the vamp pair.Things would be great, so long as the bi-vamp didn't keep having thoughts like this:"She smiled at me knowingly as she imagined the various ways in which she might filet my flesh."How awesome it THAT descriptive?! So Hope must keep herself safe from little miss jealous-bi-bitch-vampire while falling in love with her master.Now the love story between the human and the vampire is pretty awesome. I LOVE the ending of this book, it ties up beautifully along with a decent amount of tension before hand. What I wasn't particularly fond of though was the bloodslave idea. While the actual becoming of a bloodslave was a cool idea, the fact that with each bite from the vampire, the human was bought to a finger-clenching, wailing orgasm every time was not quite so great. It just felt a bit over done.Overall, I found this book great fun to read. I loved the rawness of the main character, her honesty at her debasement and her eventual journey through her rough upbringing. I did find minor editing errors (an extra full stop here and some weird sentence structure there), but nothing that completely distracted me from the tale.I am giving Blood Slave by Travis Luedke 3.5 out of 5 stars.