Review: Amusing, silly, a bit sexy...fun!
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 25, 2014
I received this book in exchange for an honest review via Goodreads' Don't Buy My Love program.This paranormal/urban fantasy m/m romance follows the relationship of Brant, mayor of Bright City, Indiana--who happens to be a closet vampire, and Rabb, an alpha werewolf, who owns City Light, a shifter bar in Bright City. Brant and Rabb are desperately in love with each other, but they broke up five years ago because drinking shifter blood makes vampires crazed. As it's natural for both vampires and shifters to drink from their sexual partners, Brant swore off both Rabb, and sex. So Brant's as sexually frustrated as he is thirsty....Brant has decreed Bright City a shifter-free zone. This enrages Rabb, who likes his werewolf pack to be urban. The timeline of the story bothered me, here, because it seems as if this is a long-standing issue, keeping shifters out, yet it also seems as if it is imperative to keep normal humans from knowing about shifters. How does one create laws banning certain societal elements, without alerting the population to the existence of said elements? Logically, I was stumped.Also, Rabb's bar in Bright City is fairly well established. I mean he's got at hiring business, and a gigantic warehouse that is filled with flora and fauna (and a pond for goodness sake) for his urban pack to frolic in. That takes time and money to build. It's also a bit hard to keep quiet, I'd think. Yet, the book opens with a mayoral assistant trying to evict Rabb from his business. How did they not recognize all the shifters were going to City Lights? And, where is all the law enforcement in this place? Not one single cop in the whole story, and there are several murdered shifters, the first being Rabb's bartender.Instead of law enforcement, the closet vamp Mayor Brant decides that appointing Rabb as an assistant will allow Rabb to investigate the murders of his pack mates. This, to me, only makes the likelihood of shifter discovery higher, but it has the convenient plot aspect of bringing Brant's hearts desire (Rabb) into excruciatingly close proximity. Brant hungers for Rabb's blood, and his splendid manly attributes, but refuses to indulge as that way lay madness...Then, the mayor and Rabb work together try to solve the shifter murder mystery. Again, no police. And, no one seems to really notice that Brant is shirking his mayoral duties being an amateur sleuth. Rabb takes Brant to sacred shifter territory, and the pack is enraged--wants to kill him. There is no love lost between shifters and vamps, even if the vampire doesn't drink blood. Then, Brant pops in on a big shifter jamboree and is nearly devoured. Dumbest. Vampire. Ever. Rabb is brutally attacked trying to get Brant to safety. Brant ingests shifter blood in the melee and suffers greatly after five years of abstinence. Then, smexytimes. [Me: O_o (?) *remembers it's urban fantasy* *shrugs*]Anywho, our dogs and vamps are on the case. Brant enlists the vampire council to aid the search. Rabb nearly dies when he encounters the killer. The killer is later found and barely overpowered. More smexytimes.Lookit. This is not great literature. I found my eyes rolling more than ten times. It is kinda mindlessly amusing in it's campiness, however, and the addition of the mystery subplot adds an edge of danger that kept it interesting. Basically, the main story line is: how can we get two hot paranormal dudes to bang, without making it a bang-fest? The world building was meh--timelines and vigilante legal issues aside--there was only ONE "human" in the whole book. And the idea that a mayor of any 'city' in Indiana could keep his homosexuality, or vampirism, on the down-low seemed to be the biggest fantasy element, to me. (But I'm from Illinois, and we got a saying in Illinois: Stay out of Indiana. If you've been there you'd understand...Hoosierland is rivaled only by, perhaps, Oklahoma or Arizona in it's homophobic political stances.)I wished the smexytimes had been a touch hotter. Perhaps that'll happen in book 2.