2008 urban fantasy novella, side story in the Night Huntress (Cat and
Bones) series. Isabella Spaga the restaurateur has caught the eye of a
minor-league mobster looking to move up in the world, he insists on
marrying her, and her ne'er-do-well brother tells her to go along with
it then drops out of contact. But help is on the way.
I don't think I ask an excessive amount of this sort of junk-food
urban fantasy. I mean, sure, sexy vampire beats up bad guys, heroine
falls in love with him, they boink like rabbits, no problem there.
But… I do want a little bit of dramatic tension. Chance, a friend of
the vampire Bones who's the lust-object of the main series, lets the
mobsters think they've murdered him and disposed of the body, twice,
in order to gather information by listening to their bragging to
someone they're about to kill, and there's never any sense that he's
in danger. (They don't know that there are vampires, never mind what
highly specific actions they'd need to take in order to injure him
beyond what he can easily regenerate.) The only uncertainty is about
where the bad guy is holding Isa's brother.
So on the one hand what actually happens here is decent – Chance turns
up and gradually rises in Isa's estimation from stupid macho guy to
potential life partner, protecting her from bad guys along the way.
That's fine. But the shape of the story would be much better if she
got to do something to save herself, if any of Chance's plans didn't
go exactly the way he was expecting them to, if there were, well, any
surprises. Or indeed if we saw her being good at restauranting, but
even that's mentioned only quite briefly.
This was written originally for the Weddings from Hell UF anthology,
with three other stories by writers I don't know. I get the impression
that the main publishing purpose of these things is to
cross-pollinate: the dedicated reader of author A buys it for A's new
story, and then gets hooked on the others. (Then a few years later the
thing comes out as a stand-alone novella on Kindle.) I have to say
that if I'd met this in isolation I probably wouldn't have been
hooked.
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