ISBN: 0-441-00875-5 Order from: Amazon.com
This sometimes intense vampire fantasy suffers from ultimately ineffectual heroine and predictable interactions.
Reviewed by David on October 20, 2002
Genre: Fantasy (Vampire, ESP, Mystery)
Synopsis: Selena Crawford is a detective in Chicago. She has some relatives who claim to have the Sight—and are pretty good at it. But she has always stayed away from the fuzzy, mystical things—until she met Istvan. Istvan is a real, deadly, ancient vampire. And Selena is bound to him as a Companion, craving sex with him as much as she hates the compulsion. It doesn't much help that the feeling is mutual—Istvan the loner enforcer of the Vampire underworld is attracted to his Companion by ties much stronger than normal blood-lust.
The worst thing about the bond, however, is Selena's being forced to acknowledge, and reluctantly participate in the shadowy world of vampires, ghouls and witches. Even use her own fledgling abilities.
As a detective, Selena sometimes is forced to hide the evidence with supernatural aspects—such as corpses of dead vampires. One such calls her resented lover to her side—and to her bed. The investigation of a serial vampire killer forces them to work together, and to confront dangers to Selena, her family and her city.
Full Review: The book is filled with pleasant, tense rapartee between Selena and Istvan. The dialogue, and Selena's temper is satisfying, and their interaction is full of tension, lust and humor.
Alas, the fiery heroine's bark is worse than her bite, and the reader is disappointed by the relative ineffectiveness of the tough detective, and her actual dependence on her strong Vampiric lover. Added to the apparently complex set of rules for the vampiric universe, the book seems to leave little role for Selena, whose viewpoint is used in the book.
While pleasantly written, and containing excellent verbal fireworks between the heroine and her lover, the book suffers from a predictable plot and a heroine ultimately ineffective, especially compared to other strong women in the subgenre such as Hamilton's Anita Blake, Stackhouse Harris's Sukie, and Collins's Sonja Blue (Guilty Pleasures, Dead Until Dark, Midnight Blue and their respective sequels).
series title: Laws of the Blood
Copyright: 2001
type: mass-market
Overall: 4.5; Plot: 4.5; Characters: 4.5; Style: 5; World-building: 5; Originality: 4;
Berkley Publishing Group (Ace), October 2001, 265 pages
ISBN: 0-441-00875-5 Order from: Amazon.com