A Candle for D'Artagnan: An Historical Horror Novel (Atta Olivia Clemens, No 3)

Rating:
Summary: Possibly the most boring book I have ever read.
Review: ........ (The reviewer has unfortunately fallen into a comotose state due to the exceptionally tedious, dull, unimaginative plot and characters in this book.)

Rating:
Summary: Everyone for themselves and Olivia for all!
Review: An Italian Queen, A French cardinal, a Gascon guard and a Roman vampire..Ironically, Olivia is pressed into diplomatic service..for the Church! A respectable Roman widow can hardly refuse a request from that source, so she sets up house at the French court and tries to inject a little vampirish long -sighted rationality into the political scene that wiped out all three Musketeers. Naturally, Dumas' great lover becomes Olivia's. Naturally, she hopes this is the one who will last..forever. Unfortunately, no mortal can ever be quite as heroic as a vampire with a mission..but they will try. Poor Olivia..poor St. Germain! (oh, Ms. Yarbro, why do crucial plot twists have to happen in a letter from offstage?) not as good as others in the series, but any book in the vampire chronicles is better than most..

Rating:
Summary: Admirable Olivia
Review: In A Candle for D'Artagnan, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has provided Atta Olivia Clemens with her ultimate reward, a lover who embraces her life cheerfully, passionately and with respect. Yarbro borrows D'Artagnan, the unlettered Gascon hero of the Dumas Musketeer novels, and gives him a new stature as Olivia's ultimate partner. Dumas would have been proud, if he had recovered from his shock.

It is a pleasure -- albeit a bittersweet one -- to read this best of the Olivia books and realize that if there had been no Count de Saint-Germain, one would still want to know this brave, wise woman who only incidentally has lived for centuries.

Rating:
Summary: Ninth in the Saint-Germain series.
Review: Or third in the Olivia series, depending on how you look at it.

For those unfamiliar with the series, the Saint-Germain series is a series of historical "horror" novels (although the horror element is tenuous at best, based purely on the fact that the main characters are vampires, and "vampire fiction" is considered a subgenre of "horror fiction"; actually, "historical romance" is closer to accurate) in which the main character is the vampire Saint-Germain, who has lived as a vampire since roughly 1500-2000 BCE. In this book, however, as in the previous two, the main character is Atta Olivia Clemens, who as a lover of Saint-Germain's became a vampire when she died, back in the Rome of the Emperor Nero (in the third book of the series, "Blood Games".)

This book is set in France during the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, which is the period during and slightly after the time of Cardinal Richelieu of "The Three Musketeers" fame. The "d'Artagnan" of the title is based on the historical Charles d'Artagnan on whom Dumas based his hero, not on the fictional hero himself.

In some ways, this book is better than the two previous books focusing on Olivia; my major complaint about them, that Olivia's vampiric powers were downplayed too severely, does not apply to this book. But I have a very major problem with EXTREMELY major plot points happening offstage, and the reader being informed of them after the fact and given an insufficient description of events to follow the action. This was badly done, and is a major part of my failure to rate this book more highly. Also, the editing did not seem as tight as in the previous entries; far too many typos and incorrect word usage (being "adverse" to something, rather than "averse", etc) managed to slip through. I hope this trend doesn't continue into the later books in the series.

This is an enjoyable read, better than some in the series, certainly not as good as "Tempting Fate", the fifth book in the series.

Rating:
Summary: Shocking!
Review: Probably the best entry in Yarbro's two intertwined vampire series. After a while, the long-suffering St. Germain and his endless procession of misunderstood mortal girlfriends becomes a little dull. Yarbro's Roman vampire heroine, Olivia, has a much better excuse; she's living in centuries when a woman without a male protector is one step away from being a social outcast. Behavior that would be maddeningly passive from St. Germain is pleasantly assertive in Olivia. Charles D'Artagnan, who falls in both love and lust with Olivia, gives the book a breath of fresh air. In a series where most male characters are either eunuchs or evil sadists, it's nice to see a testosterone-driven character who is nonetheless honorable and likeable. As in all these books, Yarbro has done her historical homework. Charles is definitely based on the real historical figure, not the book or movie D'Artagnan of the Three Musketeers. Readers who are expecting Dumas will be disappointed (the historical Athos, already dead when the book opens, is dismissed in a sentence) but Charles has much the same energy and enthusiasm you'd expect from a movie D'Artagnan. A fun novel even if you've never read the series; although it's the last book of a trilogy, it reads well on its own.