Marna C. (feritgrrl) - , reviewed The book is better than the title on 5/27/2009 + 43 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

Ok- to start. I really like most all of Katie MacAlister's books. They are always funny,sexy,romantic and exciting. But the titles...the current trend of trying to give them cute pop-culture reference-y names isn't working for me and doesn't have anything to do with the actual plot of the book itself.
That said- this is a book two of a 'mini-series' I guess I'd call it, that started with Zen and the Art of Vampires. This story continues the romance between Pia Thomason and her Dark One, Kristoff, picking up at a point just after the last book left off with the vampire and his Beloved seperated through misunderstanding and miscommunication. Pia is not given long to patch up her broken heart before she is hauled back into the battle between the anti-vamp Brotherhood of the Light, who insist she is their Zorya- some sort of ritual ghost/spirit guide- and the Dark Ones- who have summoned her to answer for various crimes including the disappearence of Alec, a Dark One who had been, well,a friend 'plus benefits' to Pia before she found herself Kristoff's Beloved and wife.
Pia and Kristoff must team up to solve the mystery of Alec's disappearence and the murder of the previous Zorya as well as saving some of the spirits Pia left hanging around at the end of the last book. Oh yes, and they must discover how to work out the apparent mistake- they think- of their link as Dark One and Beloved.

I enjoyed most of the book- with some reservations. MacAlister works waaay too hard at trying to write funny/zany secondary characters.This never works- without exception these characters are annoying to me and detract from the story. If the heroine is already smart, witty and/or clueless in an amusing way, it is just overdoing it with the 'extra' comedic factor. The secondary friend characters would work much better as 'straight men' to the main action- or at least tone down the zany... a lot.

It isn't the worst thing to bring in characters from previous books, but again, the attempt to make them funny doesn't quite work. Let the characters be themselves as they were in the previous book- and enough with the jokes about petnames etc. Yes this is a fantasy novel, but the characters can act somewhat like normal folk, or at least converse like them in that it just seems odd to have them divulging their bedroom secrets and intimate pet names to total strangers whom they have just met, in front of large numbers of other 'people' listening to the conversation.

So far, I have been pleasantly surprised by this series. I have read all of the books thus far and while this wasn't my favorite of the series, it isn't the worst either (I thought the first one was kind of a clunker.)In the main, a fun read, but Katie, if you are listening, ditch the 'zany friends,'please!

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