Helpful Score: 5
Warring vampire clans??? Hardly any action war wise or romance wise. Wolf series was much better. I'll be staying away from any of her future attempts with vamps.
Helpful Score: 4
Dense writing style that did not necessarily develop the characters adequately. I would probably not read more of this series.
Helpful Score: 1
I actually liked this book. I've read some the Wolves cycle from Ms. Krinard, and I can honestly say that the slow building of the plot -and the twist at the end!- was very nice. Warring vampire gangs in the 1920's sounds a bit farfletched, but if you look at the actual history of the time period, it makes sense.
The relationship between Gwen and Dorian takes its own sweet time, which makes it completely believable. Ms Krinard has a very stylized prose that actually takes you there to the bleak humdrum of Hell's Kitchen and the misery of the docks and back alleys. It reflects on the journey of the heart that Gwen goes thru, from desolate to bright and in the middle of a war between good and evil.
Ms. Krinard introduces a concept almost unheard of in the genre: a Vampire dedicated to God. She has (masterfully) pushed this beacon of light into the background, to serve as a guide for those less altruisticly inclined... oh but I reveal too much.
This book has very little (sexy) romance, but the way Dorian and Gwen gravitate around each other is a thing romantic dreams (and nightmares) are made of.
The relationship between Gwen and Dorian takes its own sweet time, which makes it completely believable. Ms Krinard has a very stylized prose that actually takes you there to the bleak humdrum of Hell's Kitchen and the misery of the docks and back alleys. It reflects on the journey of the heart that Gwen goes thru, from desolate to bright and in the middle of a war between good and evil.
Ms. Krinard introduces a concept almost unheard of in the genre: a Vampire dedicated to God. She has (masterfully) pushed this beacon of light into the background, to serve as a guide for those less altruisticly inclined... oh but I reveal too much.
This book has very little (sexy) romance, but the way Dorian and Gwen gravitate around each other is a thing romantic dreams (and nightmares) are made of.
This one was just OK for me. I tend to enjoy supernatural thrillers, but I felt like they could have done so much more to play up the time period in this one too. It's set in 1920s New York City and features a female newspaper reporter and her quest to discover if her deceased father's writings about blood-thirsty gangs ruling the New York underworld are really true or just fantasy. There are some cool vampire moments, and a weird cult of vampires trying to wipe out all vampires (?), but the idea of this secret "book" the main character is searching for the whole time seems to fall a little flat in the end. And other pretty crazy things happened to her along her quest that I felt she should have been more upset about. Well-written for what it is - a romance novel, but not good as historical fiction or even a thriller, really.
