Friday, September 25

Jeaniene Frost: Halfway to the Grave

Twenty-two years ago a vampire raped a young woman resulting in the birth of a daughter who has grown up with a lot of the vampire’s abilities and all of her mother’s hate for the race. Now she’s out to stake anyone without a pulse in the hopes that one of her victims will be the louse who fathered her.
A routine hunt goes terribly wrong and she is captured by a vampire bounty hunter. To save her life she makes a deal with him: she’ll act as bait so that he can catch an elusive master vampire and in return he’ll train her to use her abilities and help her track down her dad.
Working with him she soon begins to question her hatred of all things undead. As their relationship takes a turn for the romantic she learns to accept what she is and that not all vampires are bad.
But their relationship is doomed from the start with her family’s resistance, a master vampire out to use her to get to her new lover and a covert government department determined to recruit her and kill him.
This book is the first in a series and the one thing about it that really stuck out to me was the hero. Anybody who has ever seen the TV series Buffy would recognize the hero as a version of the vampire Spike. Not only did his physical description bring the TV character to mind, he was also English (reflected by tragic inclusions in dialogue that make me think the author has never actually spoken to an Englishman) and has a single word name. At least the heroine here is nothing like her Buffy counterpart.
But if you can see past the heroic homage and the average writing, the story itself is fast paced, multilayered and includes some hot love scenes.
For me this book is the literary equivalent to kraft macaroni cheese (you know the stuff in the blue box). You know it’s rubbish and you shouldn’t eat it but you do and you love it anyway. It’s a shameful indulgence that you don’t want to give up because sometimes it just hits the spot. That’s this book, and maybe even this series, for me. We’ll see.-Lynn

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