Blood Debt (1997)

I kind of wish this was where the Blood books had started, because Vicki is a better vampire than a human. Not that she's a bad human, but watching her apply her supernatural bullheadedness to vampire social mores is just more interesting than watching her bully her cop ex-colleagues.

The actual plot is fine, if not nearly as gripping as the previous one, but the real entertainment is Vampire Vicki in action. Not one to miss, but it's an odd place for the series to take a sharp left into a new main character. ( )

How much of the vampire is based on the person you were before the change? How does your growth as a person after the change affect the vampire you are? How does the vampire you are affect the person you are? These are the questions they face in this book..... ( )

In Huff’s fantasy novel, Henry Fitzroy was many things: vampire, graphic novelist, and bastard son of Henry VIII. He has survived for centuries by obeying to the letter the vampire’s code. Keeping to himself he stayes out of the limelight, never slaughteres needlessly and respects other vampire’s territory. But now unwanted guests have invaded his inner sanctum. The ghost’s of murder victims demand his assistance, forcing him to break the code he lives by to help them. Unable to accomplish this on his own, he reaches out for assistance from his friend, private investigator Vicki Nelson.

A master of urban fantasy, Huff has outdone herself again. ( )

You certainly shouldn't start with this book--it's the fifth and currently the last in a series involving private investigator Vicki Nelson, her friend and lover Toronto cop Mike Celluci and 450-year old vampire Henry Fitzroy--who was born the illegitimate son of Henry VIII of England. Read first Blood Price, Blood Trail, Blood Lines and Blood Pact. The various books deal with classic supernatural monsters. The first deals with a demon, the second werewolves, the third an Egyptian mummy and the the fourth zombies--this time it's ghosts. And if you haven't read the prior books, stop now. Don't read this review, which will be packed with spoilers from the prior books.

In the last book, Blood Pact, Henry was forced to turn Vicki into a vampire to save her life. But there was a catch. In most respects Henry is along traditional vampiric lines, though he's one of those "good guy" vampires that's very human in his mindset with supernatural powers rather than an evil monster. But in Huff's world vampires are very territorial creatures. A newly-made vampire can stay with their maker for only a year before separating or they'll tear each other apart. So while Vicki remained with Mike in Toronto, Henry left for Vancouver with Tony. But faced with a series of murders and hauntings, Henry asks Vicki and Mike for help.

The thing is was Vicki was always borderline unlikable. I had some sympathy for her in the prior books because she was dealing with going blind--a condition that cost her a career as a police officer and I admired her struggles to remain independent. But she's that stereotypical fictional female in law enforcement who feels she has to be more macho than any male. Now she's a vampire. She's no longer handicapped (other than not being able to tolerate sunlight) and she's added the aggression of a predator--and because of the territorial imperative both she and Henry are struggling not to be at each others' throats.

This is still an enjoyable book, but in the context of the series feels an anticlimax and is my least favorite among the five. ( )

Tanya Huff's novel Blood Debt is the final book in the Victoria Nelson series, which began with Blood Price. Unfortunately, it's a much less satisfying ending than the previous book, Blood Pact, would have made. (Please be wary of spoilers ahead, especially if you haven't read Blood Pact.)

The book's first issue is that the plot doesn't really fit with the rest of the series. While the series as a whole focus on supernatural plots - demons, werewolves, ancient Egyptian gods - and the previous novel used a scientific angle to approach the supernatural - researchers creating zombies in the lab - the supernatural element of Blood Debt is very forced. The main plot is based on, of all things, urban legends about black market organs and kidney thefts. The supernatural element is that Henry, for little reason other than the plot requiring it, becomes haunted by the victims of an organ selling ring, who are scaring people to death in order to coerce his help. It feels tacked on as an afterthought, as if the organ theft story came from a completely different series.


The next problem is Vicki and Henry. At the end of Blood Pact, Vicki is dying and Henry turns her in order to save her. Then he leaves town, because vampires are instinctively territorial and cannot share hunting grounds. This makes a fitting, if bittersweet, conclusion to the series, whose rules of vampires are designed to avoid the issue of simply bringing across the people you love without any consequences.

In the interim between books, Vicki has gotten used to her new life as a vampire, and Michael Celluci has started filling the role she used to fill for Henry, who has moved to Vancouver with his occasional lover Tony. When Henry enlists her help to get rid of the ghosts, however, they discover that the territorial nature of vampires might not be so instinctual after all, but rather an outdated learned behavior from a time when towns were too small to sustain more than one vampire. While Henry and Vicki no longer relate as they used to, they get along fairly well for people who should supposedly be trying to kill each other.

This sudden change the series's rules of vampirism seems like cheating, a way to make the Henry/Vicki fans happy without actually getting them together for good, and a way to disregard the negative consequences of turning someone into a vampire. This change is a disappointing one, because the solitariness of vampires was one of the more interesting things about the series, preventing it from getting overrun with vampires, and the clear negative effects of the vampire's condition made it seem realistic and not something to be coveted too much, rather than a way to cheat death scot-free.

These two factors combined make Blood Debt mostly unsatisfying. It's a decent book, and Vicki's new status as a vampire prompts some interesting developments in her character, but it's not final enough to make a good last book of the series.

http://www.helium.com/items/1594187-blood-debt-tanya-huff-review ( )