Review of Acquainted with the Night by Piper Maitland

Publisher: Berkley
Release Date: November 29th, 2011
Series: #1 in the Night series
Buying Links: Amazon     The Book Depository

Book Blurb (from goodreads):

The pages of history are written in the blood of the undead…
A woman’s quest for the truth…
A medieval icon that holds the clues…
An ancient book with the power to shake Christianity—and humanity itself… 


Caroline Clifford’s bland life as a London tour guide flips upside down when her beloved uncle is brutally murdered at a Bulgarian archeological site. While traveling to recover his remains, she meets a man who corresponded with her uncle. Jude Barrett is a biochemist on a mission—to eradicate the world of vampires… 

 At first, Caro is dismissive of Jude’s beliefs, but she can’t ignore the signs around her—the human bites on her uncle, the strange men following her, the anguished cries after sundown. Strange anagrams on her uncle’s passport lead her and Jude to a cliff-top monastery in Greece, where a shattering revelation connects a relic Caro inherited from her parents to an age-old text on immortality—and an enigmatic prophecy that pits the forces of darkness and light in a showdown that could destroy them all…

Teaser:

She stepped over to the mirror and lowered the scarf. She'd expected to see two jagged holes, but the wounds were much larger. Serrated tooth marks curved into two half moons, one set above the other, with a circle of unblemished flesh between them. He'd bitten into her the way a normal person would bite into an apple. The bleeding had slowed, and a thin scarlet line zigzagged down her neck.

My Thoughts:

"Acquainted with the Night" is a blend of mystery, thriller, urban fantasy and romance. Add in some religion and European history, and you get a story full of action, twists and turns, and yet another update on vampire mythology. Although, the religious aspects and some of the vampire traits reminded me a little bit of "The Cowboy and The Vampire" by Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall.

I was hooked from the first page. "Acquainted with the Night" is a mystery, a search for religious icons with international bad guys after our heroes, melded with a story about vampires in the twenty-first century and the result is a thrilling, fascinating story about a woman's search, not only for the religious icons, but for her family and herself and her struggle to adapt to the truth about herself and also find love. Now, that's a lot for one book and sounds like it could be a soap opera but Maitland manages to avoid soap opera territory. It's a long book, 539 pages in paperback, in order to accommodate everything and the resolution is open minded but book two is coming in 2012. If you like an intelligent story and a mix of genres, and don't mind a little sex, you need to pick up this book.

I received a paperback from the publisher for review.