RogerBW's Blog

2007 urban fantasy. In modern Ohio, Cat hunts vampires, surprisingly well for a human, but she has some hidden advantages. Bones is an ancient vampire who's tracking down his own kind for his own reasons. Eventually, they make common cause. There is also sex.

Well, yeah, there's a lot of the junk-food quality about this book. Cat, the narrator, is half vampire, thereby getting many of the benefits of vampness (rapid healing, super strength and speed, etc.) without most of the downsides. Bones is smokin' hawt, not a rapist (apparently this makes him unusual, at least among the male population of this book) and (just in case you didn't get the point that this is one classy dude) British. Pretty much everything that happens is sex, vampire hunting, or talking about or preparing for sex or vampire hunting.

"Tonight you and I will drink and dance and absolutely murder no one."

But on the other hand there's a spark here that I enjoyed, starting with its answer to the standard urban fantasy question of "why does the cover picture show a woman who just rented a Slutty Vampire Hunter costume but they'd run out of skirts?". Answer, most vampires are predators in the social as well as the biological sense, and the preferred feeding method of that type is to pick up susceptible young women, then make them forget what happened. (Most of them aren't even murderers, most of the time. Which, given that we're told that some five per cent. of the human population is actually undead, would seem essential!) So Cat dresses like that to be bait. It's not a great answer, but at least it is an answer.

I sat at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic. The first man who tried to kill me had ordered it for me. It was now my drink of choice. Who said I wasn't sentimental?

What did throw me slightly is that in the closing chapters there's a sudden twist and what I assume is mostly setup for the next book in the series, which seems to twist the genre slightly, not to mention requiring Cat (established as basically untrusting) to trust people on far too little information… I'll see how that goes when I get there, I suppose.

And that may be some time, because I'm going to put this after Carrie Vaughn's Kitty series in the "supernatural fluff" queue.

[He] whistled "Amazing Grace" as he drove. It was all I could do not to whip my head around and snap, Are you kidding me? Couldn't he pick something more appropriate, like "Shout at the Devil" or "Don't Fear the Reaper"? Some people had no sense of the proper music for a kidnapping.

I found this by recommendation from Ilona Andrews, who mentioned Frost's new blog release The Other Half of the Grave, a novella giving Bones's side of the events of this story. (I'll review that separately when it's complete…)