Corin's honor demands he do his duty, but he cannot execute the lovely woman while any part of her humanity remains. He must also find-and kill-her sire. Jasmine denies ever having contact with a vampire, causing Corin to question the justice of his orders. Sensing his hesitation, the Council dispatches another executioner, forcing the pair to make a run for it.
Every hour they spend together-every sensual encounter they share-finds them growing closer. Now Corin will have to choose: kill the woman he loves, or go against everything he believes to set her free.
My thoughts: The first paragraph of the book blurb caught me eye and had me laughing out loud in the library. I knew I had to read this story. Unfortunately, the story did not meet my expectations. The blurb starts out humorous and then gets serious. The book starts out serious and stays there. There is little humor in the story; the story itself does progress in the fashion described by the blurb so that was accurate but I expected humor and also heat. I got neither.
I have to say that Carney's writing style really put me off. It's choppy, full of sentence fragements. One paragraph will consist of nothing but one sentence fragment after another, making it difficult, for me anyway, to read and to follow. It really disrupted the flow of the story; I would find myself mentally re-writing fragments or whole paragraphs into something that made sense. Then there would be passages that were grammatically fine but just didn't hold my attention. Over the course of five days, I would constantly pick it up and put it down; finishing the story was a struggle for me. The last quarter of the story, approximately, was when I got involved and I finished that in one sitting.
That last bit is when the excrement hits the fan and the action really begins. Up until then, I was having a hard time really caring what happened, if Jasmine lived, if they had a HEA, etc. I liked the ending, it was a mix of predictable and surprising.
We get several scenes of Corin in the past, before and after he becomes a vampire. I liked him in those scenes and I felt for him but whenever the action shifted back to the present, he became stiff, a cardboard character. Jasmine seems like she could be your next door neighbor, she comes across as likable but I could never quite connect to her. I think the story length was part of the problem; Carney needed more time to develop the characters and make them less cardboard. Instead, they are stock characters - Jasmine is the workaholic adult orphan too busy to make friends or have a life, and that hasn't changed by story's end. Corin is the brooding, alpha male scarred by his past. We do see some slight change in him, but not enough. In addition, it wasn't explained to my satisfaction why Jasmine needed to be executed simply because she was turned vampire without the ruling council's permission. I understood going after her sire, the vampire who turned her, but no reasonable explanation was given for the council's decree to kill the innocent progeny.
I mentioned earlier that I never felt the heat between Jasmine and Corin. They have plenty of scenes where they make out or have sex but to me, it was all insert Tab A into Slot B. The erotic scenes just didn't feel erotic to me, and that's a fairly large component of the novella.
This review was first published at Book Lovers Inc. I received this as an e-galley from NetGalley.
I haven't read any book by Dee Carney but I really want to because I love her covers! *g*
ReplyDeleteThanks for the review!