RogerBW's Blog

The Vampire and the Case of the Wayward Werewolf, Heather G. Harris 19 September 2024

2024 paranormal fantasy, first of a series. Bunny Barrington is working for the cops in a tiny town in Alaska. Oh, and she's a vampire.

It's desperately clichéd but somehow it works. Bunny was a rich kid who ran away from her parents, but at a party she got involuntarily vamped. That's a vampire crime, but not when the King of Europe's favourite offspring does it; meanwhile, she's expected to serve him for a hundred years. Oh, and someone paid him to do it. (Series plot!)

And none of that is immediately germane to what's happening in this book, except that Bunny has run away from all that, and is now hiding in this small town full of various supernatural people (including both "shifters" and "weres", and I guess I'm meant to know the difference). She needs some source of income, she isn't a fisher, a miner or a lumberjack, but the local police chief ("Nomo") needs an administrative assistant.

Oh, and there are missing people, and there will soon be murders.

There's a lot packed in here, in other words. And I'm very glad to see that the emphasis is on the crime-solving, rather than on the supernaturalism; there's actual deduction going on here, and compiling and reviewing evidence rather than just saying "they're nasty so they must be the villain", and all that good stuff that often seems to be ignored in favour of romance, supernatural powers solving everything, and so on; Bunny may notice more (vampiric senses) and retain more (photographic memory) than some, but she and her allies still need to put the pieces together and work out what's going on.

A bit of a hidden gem, really, and this sort of thing is why I occasionally follow Goodreads recommendations. Yes, all right, Bunny is Not Like Other Vampires, and she appears to have some kind of magic powers too, but somehow it doesn't make her into a Mary Sue; she doesn't glory in all this, she's just trying to get along, and her victories don't come easily.

[Buy this at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

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