Nocturnal Book Reviews

Okay, although I didn't love this book as much as Blood Shadows, Lindsay J. Pryor is an author with a great potential. She writes paranormal romance mixed with urban fantasy the way I like it - clever world-building, intense characters and no easy options for them to take. Also, be ready for plenty of blood and violence as it's an integral part of Blackthorn - a paranormal enclave the vampires and werewolves are forced to live in.

Miss Pryor's heroines are faced with dubious moral decisions to make, her heroes are real nasty bastards, the way I always imagined vampires (they are not precious snowflakes full of angst in my book) could be.

I could not read Blood Roses in one go. This is such an intense read, that I felt emotionally wretched and had to walk away from the book few times just to give myself a breather.

Caleb is a born vampire. When his brother drinks dead blood and is on the brink of death, he finds a witch who can cleanse his blood, but the only way to lure her to Blackthorn is to threaten her sister's life.

Leila has been hiding her deadly nature, even struggling against it all her life avoiding anything to do with vampires, and now she has to get deep into Blackthorn's territory to get her sister back, and she is deadly afraid that the vampires will see her for what she is to their race, - an ultimate poison.

Unfortunately for her, her fears come true, and she has very little time to persuade Caleb to let her go before her own carefully constructed life and her sister's existence come crushing down when her secret is revealed.

What follows is a series of intense mind games where Caleb is trying to find out a hidden motive in Leila's appearance by pushing all her buttons, and she is trying not to give him an excuse to kill her, while both fight an absurd and inexplicable sexual attraction.

Blood Roses was an excellent read, although I had to take a point off my rating for a vague ending and some logical discrepancies in plot. If someone is drained to the brink of death, I expect their recovery to involve blood and glucose transfusions, horrible headache and dry mouth at the very least. I don't expect them to wake up like nothing happened and have wild monkey sex. I think it's a reasonable expectation, n'est-pas?

(Correction: after consulting the author, she reassured me that the vampire stopped before the victim lost too much blood, so in this regard I am satisfied).

Recommended with slight reservations.