Blood Secrets (The Vampire Legacy)

Rating:
Summary: A modern Female Vampire
Review: Blood Secrets is a fairly entertaining book that finds it's own niche in the Vampire genre by having (1) the Vampire be a female and (2) having her try to fit in to modern day society.

For at least 10 years, our Heroine, Deirdre Griffin, has been a successful fashion designer in New York. She's moving toward the top, is rich, and has managed to keep her secret safe from everyone with the exception of a one time lover, Max. The story begins where her life as she knows it starts to falls apart. Murders begin to happen, and the police, especially Decective Mitch Greer get involved.

The storyline is a combination of mystery and romance wrapped around a modern day Vampire. The book is well written and keeps a certain amount of suspense throughout.

On the negative side, even knowing it is a work of fiction, I still found much of the book unrealistic. It's hard to believe that Dierdre has been and is one of the top fashion designers and has kept her secret safe from everyone for at least 10 years. Also, since she doesn't know that other than her maker (who she doesn't know) she doesn't even know if any other 'of her kind' even exist. She has books on Vampires but still seems to be very uneducated about what she is and the extent of powers that come with being a Vampire. Her strong conscience will not allow her to kill for blood and what we know she has never even come close to bending a law. Her life, lifestyle, beliefs, and education just do not seem realistic in the current time.

However, it is a good book and worth reading if you're into Vampires and especially female ones.

Rating:
Summary: Not your usual vampire novel
Review: BLOOD SECRETS, scheduled to be reprinted by Zebra in October of 1998, is the first book in Karen E. Taylor's Vampire Legacy series. Marketed as "horror," it would be more accurately described as a dark fantasy-romance that successfully blends genres.

Compared to the "mainstream," genre fiction is sometimes said to be more plot- than character-driven. BLOOD SECRETS was Ms. Taylor's first published novel, but like all well-written fiction it's primarily about the characters -- and about character as well.

Deirdre Griffin, born Dorothy Grey in 1832, is a successful New York fashion designer who happens to be a vampire. She's attractive, wealthy, and immortal as long as she's never caught outdoors at sunrise. She forms few attachments, knows no others of her own kind, and although she must subsist on human blood never kills to obtain it. She chooses instead to frequent a popular night spot called The Ballroom of Romance, where she engages in brief liaisons that allow her to feed harmlessly and are quickly forgotten.

The numbing loneliness of her existence ends when she meets Mitch Greer, a homicide detective investigating the deaths of two men Deirdre had been seen with shortly before their blood-drained bodies were found. A vampire may pass virtually unnoticed in modern-day New York, but Greer's search for the killer threatens to uncover Deirdre's secret.

Unlike the protagonists in many other vampire novels, Deirdre Griffin is fundamentally a creature of conscience. She wouldn't kill Greer even if she didn't find herself succumbing to the most dangerous of all impulses and falling in love with him.

The Vampire Legacy series deals with what grows out of Deirdre's relationship with Mitch and with the enigmatic owner of The Ballroom of Romance, Max Hunter. BLOOD SECRETS and the other novels in the sequence (to date, BITTER BLOOD and BLOOD TIES; more may be forthcoming from another publisher) are about people, both living and undead, who must find ways to solve the dil! emmas and face the consequences of love and the choices it demands.

In reading this novel you may wonder about Ms. Taylor, also the author of a number of short stories and a recent article for aspiring writers entitled "No More Silver Mirrors: The Monster in Our Times" (in WRITING HORROR: A HANDBOOK FOR THE HORROR WRITERS ASSOCIATION edited by Mort Castle). "Know your monster," she advises. "Believability of characters is integral in any story, horror or not." Just how well does Karen E. Taylor know Deirdre Griffin?

There are more than a few similarities between the character and her creator, who was interviewed in the Fall, 1994 issue of DEAD OF NIGHT magazine. Without revealing too much about the novel or its author, I can tell you that both are fond of the poetry of Stephen Crane: "In the desert / I saw a creature, naked, bestial, / Who, squatting upon the ground, / Held his heart in his hands / And ate of it. / I said: 'Is it good, friend?' / 'It is bitter -- bitter,' he answered; / 'But I like it / Because it is bitter, / And because it is my heart.'"

After reading BLOOD SECRETS you'll probably conclude that Ms. Taylor knows her characters very well indeed. She also tells a hell of a good story.

Rating:
Summary: Dull
Review: I have read many, many books about vampires, so perhaps I am jaded. This book was slow and dull. There is little plot excitement, little character depth and little originality. Parts of the book read well, but other sections read like the worst pulp fiction. It was a short book, so I was able to force myself through the whole thing, but I don't think I would have bothered if it were any longer. If you absolutely love this genre and have run out of everything else to read, you may find it just ok. If you are new to this type of book that start with almost anything else. I'm hard pressed to think of another vampire as hero/with romance book published in the last ten years that is worse.