Russell Isler

Note: I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers program.

Eddy Fry is a vampire casino owner in Las Vegas, and is decidedly less conniving than his brethren. In between fasting (he doesn't want to unethically feed on humans) and running his business, he handles the day to day problems of his constituency and tries to get a little extra sleep. One day, however, after an especially trying night, he is kidnapped by a group of strangers, transported to another vampire's domain, and finds show more himself stranded in California without his vampire powers. His attempts to escape see him traveling through California's magical underground, making new friends (and enemies), and engaging in all sorts of magical destruction. In between this is told a flashback story of his experiences in Japan during World War II, and his encounters with several terrifying wartime experiments. This is the third in the series, but it stands on its own well enough that you shouldn't need to have read the previous ones in the series to understand what's going on here.

For me personally, the narrative wore as it went on. Eddy is far too hokey for me, stuck as he is in 1940's-isms (he is a vampire, after all), and seems to speak in nothing but dated cliches. He prefers to use his own strange terminology for his vampire powers, and while this makes a certain sense, being an outsider to vampire culture, I wish he had chosen better phrases. Referring to his mesmerizing powers as "whammying" every time made it very hard to take him seriously. So I guess my main complaint is that I'm just not very fond of the main character. The rest of the book was written well and kept me highly entertained--there's quite a lot of action, and I enjoyed both the story set in the present, corny though it is, and the flashbacks to the weirdness in the Asian jungles. If you're a fan of urban fantasy and vampires, and you're sick of the will-they-won't-they romantasy that abounds on the shelves right now, this one's a fun pick. show less