Review: Fantastically Dark, Gritty and Graphic
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 26, 2013
Esparanza (Hope) is a Colombian girl forced into prostitution at an early age. She ends up in America, living poorly, under the thumb of a cartel boss as much for the exploitation of her gift of intuition as the use and abuse of her body. Her story is grim and becomes even more so when a female vampire by the name of Lia hires her for her services and discovers that her intuition is actually a form of telepathy and that she is able to pluck the thoughts right from Lia's mind. Lia's psychopathic personality is barely concealed under the surface most of the time and not concealed at all from Hope, who can see it all in Lia's thoughts. She wants Hope dead, but her master Enrique has placed a compulsion on Lia that does not allow her to freely kill. Lia must seek Enrique's permission to dispose of Hope, but bringing Hope to Enrique changes all of their lives. Enrique turns Hope into a blood slave and makes her vanish from her old life.I don't see that much changes for Hope in the grand scheme of things. She develops strong feelings for Enrique through the bond of the blood slave, but she is still used roughly by him sexually and he allows Lia to use her as well. The vampire's careless use of Hope brings her to near death on more than one occasion.I found Blood Slave to be a very dark story. As usual, Luedke did an excellent job of fleshing out his characters with little details. In this instance, those characters are a dark and scary bunch. This story is compelling and mesmerizing, but depicts a seedy, ugly underbelly of prostitution, corruption and addiction. Even the "Pretty Woman" shopping spree didn't redeem Enrique in my eyes.As in the rest of The Nightlife series, the sex is abundant, but I missed the usual quality of eroticism displayed in the first two novels. I found the sex in this story to be gritty and graphic, but the abusive relationships, addictions, and coercion were not pushing my buttons. I also found the descriptions, such as measurements of the male genitalia to be distracting and unnecessary. Huge, large, thick, long, small, etc... are all good, but put away the tape measure.This novel is fantastically disturbing. I liked the dark story and would describe it as a starkly graphic novel, which is certainly not outside my taste. As erotic romance or even just erotica, it fell a little short for me, but I am still a big Nightlife fan.Noelle Blakely, Author of A Dangerous Destiny Series