Real Vampires Hate Their Thighs by Gerry Bartlett

Real Vampires Hate Their Thighs, book 5 in the Real Vampires series, sends Glory St. Clair to Hollywood for the Grammy awards show with rock star Israel Caine. Here's her chance to walk the red carpet and be on national TV. When she meets a vamp diet guru who promises he can help her finally shed those extra pounds she's been carrying for over four hundred years, she's all for it. But he's longtime lover Jeremy Blade's ancient enemy. Could this guy have a hidden agenda? And can vamps really lose their curves? When the diet drugs begin having strange side effects a vamp war threatens to break out. Just what or who is Glory willing to sacrifice for her dream of being thin?

Something I always look for in a book, though I'm more lenient with PR titles, is a plot that could stand on it's own if all aspects of romance were removed. Not that I dislike romance in a book, I simply don't give it enough import that it can make a bad book good to me. If all I'm after is book-sex, I'll go reread Summer Camp or find something on ASSTR.

Which is one of the many reasons I consistently love Gerry Bartlett's Real Vampires books. Any of her plots, characters, or humor could carry a book enough to make it easily readable. Putting them all together makes for something seriously special and earns her a place in the top tier of my mental ratings.

Real Vampires Hate Their Thighs is everything I've come to expect from the series. It's one of the few books this year I've been disappointed in not because it was bad but because I ran out of book at the back cover. I have nothing bad to say about this book and if I start saying more descriptively good things I'm likely to devolve fully into fanboi-ism, so I'll break off here.

Except... I know very little about women's fashion but will fifteen pounds really get you six sizes in women's clothing? I gain and lose that much pretty much every year and only move up or down one pants size.

~The Mighty Buzzard

Accidentally Demonic by Dakota Cassidy

When mild-mannered Casey Schwartz wakes up in jail with no memory of how she got there she realizes two things: something weird is going on and orange is definitely not her color. After her sister bails her out, Casey has more to deal with than a foggy memory—like abrupt mood swings and fireballs shooting from her fingertips. But things really go south when a vampire shows up on her doorstep...

Clayton Gunnersson is seriously hot. And seriously taken—by a demon. In a ritual gone wrong, Clayton tried to free himself from his unwanted bond, but spilled some demonic blood on Casey. So now, Clayton’s spurned mate is inside of Casey—and she’s not happy about it. Neither is Casey, who can’t escape this bizarre love triangle. It’s hard enough being possessed by a demon. Falling for that demon’s boyfriend could get Casey killed—from the inside out…

This fourth entry into Dakota Cassidy's Accidental Romance series. It was good enough that I read it in one night, like I usually try to, but I couldn't honestly go as far as saying it was as good as her previous three books in the series. The first three I dug because they were silly almost, but not quite, to the point of absurdity, funny, witty, had the requisite amount of ass-kicking, and because I would like to do very naughty things with Nina.

All of the above still apply to Accidentally Demonic but in a slightly muted way. Only really enough that if you were already a fan, you'll notice and possibly be a tiny bit disappointed.

The thing that really necessitates a drop in my mental rating though was the shotgun approach to pop-culture references in this installment. They felt like she'd gone back through on and decided she didn't have enough, so she slapped a few more in randomly and without regard to what character was using them. They felt forced and having every character use them took away some of the uniqueness in every character they got foisted off onto*.

Bottom line, whatever rating out of five you gave The Accidental Werewolf, Accidentally Dead, and The Accidental Human, subtract 0.5 from it and that's what I give it. That works out to a 3.5 for me, I suppose. But what do I know, you may have loved the first three enough to rate them a full 5.0, in which case call this one a 4.5.

~The Mighty Buzzard

* Yes, I know I ended a sentence with a preposition. The English language is my bitch and I treat it as such. If it really bothers you though, feel free to mentally insert a comma, a space, and the word asshole after the preposition.

Flirt

An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novel. Says so right on the cover.  Talked up as one in her interviews.  Bzzzzt, Flirt isn't even close to long or complicated enough to be a novel, even a half-assed one.  Skin trade: 496 pages.  Flirt: 192 pages.  Novella I believe is the word she was looking for, though it's verging on a shortstory.

Oh, but get this... Flirt is sure as hell priced as a novel. At the $23.95¹ cover price for the hardcover, it comes in at just under 25 cents per page of paper it's printed on.  Or to put it another way, it's apparently been deemed to be worth right around a third as much as an equal weight of silver.

Ok, now that we've established false advertising and gross overpricing, let's get on to the content.

The only recurring character, aside from a few pages at the beginning and again at the end, was Anita herself.  Ok, we could work with this.  Do some quality character development on Anita, introduce another major character or three and flesh them out, slut her up like nobody's business and have her spend half the book in naughty-fun-time, or just fall back to large amounts of gratuitous violence.  Any of the above would have worked in a novella.

But does she do any of these?  Hell no.  She has to go and try to throw all of the above in and even makes a paltry attempt at fleshing out Anita's relationships with Jason, Nathaniel, and Micah.² What she ended up with was what you'd get if you wrote a great novel then went back and stripped every single thing that made it interesting out and left only a bare outline of a plot.

Summary time.  Don't bother buying this book, even if you're a die hard fan.  Don't even bother borrowing it from an unlucky friend who bought it.  If you're of a copyright violating bent, don't even bother pirating it.  I'll save you the trouble and tell you everything you need to know about it in one sentence.

Anita picks up a one-eyed werelion named Nick(y) who is completely lacking in any other noteworthy character traits.

There you go.  Now you can go on waiting for the next book and hope she doesn't give us another greedy ass-raping in Bullet.

¹  Yes, I know the ebook is only $9.99 but you can't buy an ebook, you can only license them temporarily.  You pay ten bucks and own nothing.  Hell of a deal, yeah?
²  I had to pause here to bang my head against my desk, go smoke a cigarette, and glare at various, innocent, inanimate objects before I could finish this without using the word fuck about every third word.