Blood Debt

Blood Noun: 5

ISBN: 0-88677-739-9 Order from: Amazon.com Barnes & Noble.com

A dark fantasy with a hard-boiled female detective, and the difficulty of solving crime while coping with conflicts of friendship, lust, and instinct.

Reviewed by David on November 25, 1998

Genre: Fantasy (Mystery, Vampires)

Synopsis: In a seemingly common world where vampires and other monsters hide behind the modern and multicultural life of Toronto, Vicki Nelson, a former police detective, travels to Vancouver to help her vampiric sire and former lover Henry.

Full Review: Vicki and her lover the police detective Mike Celluci travel to Vancouver. There, her former lover Henry Fitzroy, the 450-year-old vampire who turned Vicki is beset by angry ghosts demanding vengeance on their murderers. The investigation is complicated by Henry's and Vicki's instinictive antipathy: the vampires react to one another as competitor predators and are driven to attack by instinct. As Vicki and Henry struggle to maintain a working relationship between the memories of love and friendship and the urge to kill, the deadly conspiracies continue. Some of the actions of the police detective seem rather foolhardy, but the book is filled with some lovely scenes of blood-thirsty hunting, tense struggles of instinctive rage, childish pride, fragile humor and deep friendship between the two vampires. The story ends on a hopeful note, with progress if not solutions. As in the previous novels (e.g. its predecessor Blood Pact), the character development of Vicki and her two lovers is more interesting than the mystery plot.

This series is similar in setting to the Anita Blake novels.

Overall: 6.5; Plot: 5.5; Characters: 6.5; Style: 6; World-building: 6; Originality: 7;

ISBN: 0-88677-739-9 Order from: Amazon.com Barnes & Noble.com