70. Blood Price by Tanya Huff (Urban Fantasy) 272 p.
Vicki Nelson is a private investigator and former Toronto cop who left the force when her vision began to deteriorate. Henry Fitzroy is a vampire, romance novelist, and the bastard son of Henry VIII. They eventually team up to help stop a wave of serial killings in the city—killings that look remarkably like vampire attacks.
I enjoyed this book a lot, although more for the characters and the potential for the rest of the series than for the plot. It wasn’t bad (actually, it was pretty good), but Huff didn’t handle it with the same flair as she shows in the Tony Foster books. Since this was the first book in a new series, there was also a lot of exposition that I hope decreases in the later novels. I’m also not all that fond of multiple-POV’s, especially when one of the POV’s is that of the villain. Huff handles it well, but it’s just not a narrative style that I enjoy.
That said, I did have a lot of fun reading Blood Price. I adored the Toronto setting; it was so much fun recognizing the places and institutions that she mentions. Although she doesn’t mention them by name (calling them “the tabloid” and “the other city newspaper”), her descriptions of the Toronto Sun and Toronto Star are spot-on. I love that her heroine rides the TTC. I love that Tony appears in the first book (I wasn’t sure if he was in the series from the beginning or if he was introduced later, but the former turned out to be true) and I’m looking forward to watching his character develop into the Tony from Smoke and Shadows.
I love Huff’s creation of a villain who is both hissable and mundane. Mixing the supernatural with the supremely ordinary is one of her great strengths as an author of urban fantasies, and this book—in which the villain buys the paraphernalia to work evil at Canadian Tire and his local corner store—is no exception.
Books read: 70/100 (70%)
Pages read: 20,908/25,000 (84%)
Days passed: 205/365 (56%)
Wildwolf wrote, on January 20th, 2008 at 11:13 pm: