A cute, quick read if you're a fan of the chick-lit/paranormal-romance genre. Not a lot of depth or serious character development, but a fun indulgence to check out. ( )

Well! This second book in Erin McCarthy's humorous contemporary vampire romance series certainly lived up to the promise of its predecessor, High Stakes. In fact, I liked it even better.

This one features vampire Seamus Fox, the uptight campaign manager for vampire president Ethan, the hero from High Stakes. He's paired with Cara Kim--a virgin stripper.

Just the characters themselves would be enough to drive an entertaining story, but vampire politics are really cut-throat (heh), which ups the stakes (heh heh) for everybody.

Sorry about that--couldn't resist.

Anyway. Cara gets mortally injured; Seamus feels responsible, so he turns her. And when she has trouble dealing with vampire life and drinking blood, he tries to make things easier for her, breaking a lot of vampire laws to do so... a scandal in the making, especially at such a critical time in the campaign.

So he also tries to keep her a secret, and moves her into his hotel suite along with her dogs. And all the while, he's trying to keep his hands off her and keep himself in denial that he's falling in love. It is, after all, an unfamiliar emotion for him, since the last time he had a relationship with a woman (that ended disastrously, natch) was 200 years ago.

Cara, meanwhile, chafes at the restrictions. She realizes she's falling in love with Seamus, but she's no happier than he is, because she believes it's one-sided.

Bit the Jackpot is an entertaining story about characters I could really care about. We also get more of the secondary characters from the first book, including Brittany and Corbin, whose story is in Bled Dry. I'm looking forward to it. ( )

The second book in a series rarely lives up to the promise of the first book. The writing gets sloppy. The plots are predictable. This book is worse than many second books. The conflict is the same -- human is attracted to vampire, but fights the urge. Human gets killed. Human gets turned to vampire. New vampire resists hot, sweaty sex with vampire lover, but marries him in the end. The political subplot is both juvenile and unbelievable. There are more books in this series, but I won't be reading them. ( )