The Alukam

Rating:
Summary: Punishment for vamp.'s!
Review: Now that is a change! Punishment for a crime in God's eyes- suicide- but the catch is- the "victim is a vampire! Wow! I like the idea! This is a must have for your personal library! Spooky, scary,and it gets your heart pounding! I also recommend "Eternal Undying Love" by Brett Keane

Rating:
Summary: I love this book
Review: The Alukam is that rare novel that manages to cross genre boundaries with complete success. The style is police procedural, following a Gulf Coast Florida detective as he tracks a so-called "vampire" serial killer who likes to leave his victims on the beach dressed in skimpy bikinis. The detective's job is slightly complicated by being an Orthodox Jew in area where there are hardly enough to hold services, and little understanding or tolerance of orthodoxy from the more assimilated Jewish majority. (And even that majority is still a tiny minority in a mostly Bible-thumping Christian county.)

Making life even more complicated is the killer, also Jewish, but not at all the delusional psycho everyone suspects. Isaac Nathanson is a genial, urbane and very rich young man with red hair, a house on the beach filled with books in half a dozen languages, and a Mustang convertible. He is also a vampire. A real vampire, who committed suicide in 1684 and, as punishment, is doomed to eternal wakefullness, a liquid diet and the ability to rest only on the Jewish sabbath, when he must return to his coffin to be both enticed and tortured by visions of the heavenly paradise his suicide has denied him.

This novel draws on a completely different tradition than the usual vampire story. Vampirism is a punishment and not contagious. Only suicide under very particular circumstances bring it on, and only special prayers can release the victim. Sunlight, crosses, holy water, or even a stake through the heart are either utterly ignored, or no more than a minor annoyance. Instead of an ever-expanding legion of vampires, there are only a handful in the world. Nathanson is one. Another is a beautiful female, a couple centuries older than Nathanson, but looking younger, who "works" as an exotic dancer and frequently seems more interested in sex than blood.

There is, in fact, a lot of sex in this book. But there is virtually no profanity, and even the sex scenes, explicit though they may be, are described without resorting to the usual list of dirty words. The author may be a man, but the eroticism definitely appeals to a woman.

Rating:
Summary: Odd, compelling and really hot
Review: This is an unusual book, part mystery, part horror and very sexy. A sort of Rabbi Small meets Dracula at the 87th Precinct, with the story told in the Penthouse Forum. The style is pure police procedural, with the added quirk of a widowed Orthodox Jewish sheriff's department detective struggling to solve a bizarre serial murder case, raise a teenaged daughter, and cope with a thoroughly assimilated Reform Jewish sheriff who views Orthodoxy as obsolete at best. Now throw in a 300-year-old vampire and his even older girlfriend, both with a radically different life(?) style from the usual vampire, a large measure of Jewish mysticism and plenty of sex.

Curiously, the sex, while certainly explicit, manages to avoid being "dirty," creating an erotic, highly arousing setting with never a profanity or vulgarity to be found. Euphemism and metaphor can be far more erotic than crude explicitness, and that is certainly the case here.

For me, The Alukam succeeds on three levels. It's a first class police procedural, an outstanding and innovative vampire story, and a remarkable piece of tasteful erotica.

Rating:
Summary: Police Procedural, Jews, and Vampires what a combination
Review: This is certainly one of those cases of don't judge a book by its cover. The cover art looks like a ten year old did it and does nothing to portray the quality of this story. This is an excellent police procedural novel that pits a police detective, who also happens to be an Orthodox Jew, against a cunning centuries-old serial killer.

This book was fascinating in all the details, and not just in the exploration of Judaism, both historical and modern. The author is obviously extremely well read and constantly adds interesting tidbits of information about almost everything. I learned a lot from reading this book like the fact that embalming fluid is bright pink, the difference between a clinical pathologist and a forensic pathologist, that you can tell an unmarked police car from the heavy duty locking gas cap. So much extraneous information, although all of it interesting, that the author came across as somewhat of a know-it-all trying to show off. Despite that, the book will certainly satisfy the lovers of Vampire fiction, adding an entirely new chapter to an already huge vampire mythology, and at the same time will intrigue the mystery lovers, with its realistic approach. The Alukam is certainly a book that vampire lovers don't want to miss.