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Loading... The Kindred of Darknessby Barbara Hambly
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Belongs to SeriesJames Asher (5)
Fantasy.
Fiction.
Horror.
African American Fiction.
HTML:When James Asher's daughter is kidnapped by a Master Vampire, the stakes could not be higher. When James Asher and his wife Lydia's baby daughter Miranda is kidnapped by the Master Vampire of London, the stakes are high: blindly follow the Master Vampire's instructions, keep out of the way of the human networks that serves the vampires, destroy the interloper who seeks to seize control of the London Nest, and find the key to the Nest's tortuous inner workings: The Book of the Kindred of Darkness. Even with the vampire Don Simon Ysidro on their side, there's no guarantee that anything - or anyone - is who or what they appear to be. Nor is there any certainty that they'll see their child again - or survive the experience themselves. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Where the story lost momentum for me was after James returned from abroad. There were a lot of characters to juggle - Lydia is having to chaperone a niece who is 'coming out' in society while keeping quiet about her daughter's abduction and how she is spending her time doing research - luckily she is able to hire the services of some private detectives for some of the legwork - and so there is interaction with a whole host of aunts, including the awful Aunt Isobel, a domestic tyrant, plus a Suffragist friend of Lydia's. Add to that the whole circle around an American businessman, his daughter, her suitor, his friend and the complications that stem from them as well as from various groups of vampires, James coming off worst in a couple of encounters with the latter and also from a would-be Van Helsing. It didn't help that some of the names were too similar - Noel and Ned for example.
There was a big plot dependency on a book, the eponymous one of the title, and the various versions of it in existence and which were correct and which written by which historical character. This seems to be the Necronomicon (a key book in H P Lovecraft's fiction) of Hambly's series and if it is such a huge source of vampire mythology and vampire hunting etc it is a bit strange that it first appears so far into the series.
The story started to drag about two thirds of the way through though it did pick up towards the end. However, the motive of one of the characters