While the war rages on and the American Vampire Senate
looks to fill its empty seats, Dorina is still part of the squad looking to
track down the smugglers using portals to arm the Dark Mages with deadly weaponry
and creatures to tip the balance of the war
The investigation turns deadly when several vampire
agents are destroyed leaving only Dorina as a survivor with a hole in her
memory. To find out what happened, she will have to deal with vampires, fae,
fallen angels – and more plots than she could ever have imagined.
But while all this is going on Dorina has another battle –
with herself. Old barriers in her mind are coming down and everything she
believed about her dhampire nature is being challenged – presenting new threats
and new possibilities
There is a lot about this book I love
I love the development of what Dorina is, of the very
nature of the dhampires and how this relates to vampire culture. The whole
sense that vampires are deeply social and hierarchical and that Dorina’s
vampire side feels all of that but is then isolated from the hierarchy by
vampiric hatred of dhampires and her human side’s own weakness. It’s a wonderful
little twist and manages to greatly expand what Dorina is without the sense of
retconning or changing the established world setting at all. It also led to
more excellent exploration of Dorina’s character and history as well as vampire
culture. There’s also the ever-complicated relationship between Dorina and her
father which is also wonderfully expanded on and explored in this book.
I also really liked Ray in this book. We had a lot more
of his history as someone who is half-Portuguese and half-Indonesian and his
history of being rather stuck between two cultures (including an interesting
insight that previous Asian vampiric masters had used him, in centuries past,
to be their guide to Europe but missing that European blood doesn’t give
knowledge of language or custom). He really grew as a character in this book
beyond his standard role as somewhat inept comic relief. He’s survivor and a
chancer. A vampire who will never be a major power nor has any real close
family ties to keep him safe - he’s always found his niche by being clever and
being daring. He takes risks, he’s willing to try things no-one else would
consider (sometimes for very good reason) he’s imaginative and creative and
comes up with a lot of crafty answers and work arounds because of it. He
becomes an asset and we can see him as an asset without having to greatly
increase his power.
The plot itself is amazingly complicated (which I have
some problems with which I will get to) which draws on every element of this
vast world – and it is vast. I think every faction and player that has been
introduced in the last two books all plays a hand in this book – the fae, the
vampires, the mages and some new ones we’ve never heard of before. It all adds
up to an incredibly complicated master plan which fits so well in this rich and
wide world that is laid out for us
The pacing of the book is break neck (which, again, is
not without its problems). Dorina runs from action to action, scene to scene at
an incredible rate with no time to catch your breath before the next concept or
battle or revelation lands on you. This doesn’t pause or get bogged down,
though it can certainly exhaust you as you struggle to keep up with the battles
or absorb yet another chunk of world building, all of it thrown at you with
little chance to process.
The main problem I have with this book is that it feels
long. It is somewhat long, that’s certainly true, but it’s the feeling of its
length that is the problem. That sense as you’re reading that this book has
already gone on for a very long time and isn’t it about time it started to get
wrapped up?
I think it’s because just about everything in this book
is just a little bit overdone. They don’t just have a fight scene, they have a
fight scene that goes on and on and on and on. And it’s not badly written or
badly paced, it’s well described and full of action and a really vivid scene –
but it just keeps on going. And this includes battle scenes that don’t really
add a whole lot to the overall plot – like when Zheng decides to challenge and
attack Dorina when she goes out shopping (in fact, the whole scene with the buying
condoms for fae guards was just unnecessarily inserted), not only is the scene
not necessary but it just keeps going and going and going. Even scenes that are
necessary, like the zombie attack, Dorina seems to spend hours and hours and
hours hacking her way through untold legions of zombies.
In addition to these over-long scenes, we also have a
whole lot going on. This book is complicated – between mental combat and memory
exploration (which, again, goes on for far too long) to the plotting in the
vampire council, to the involvement of the smugglers, to the combat games to
fight over the vampire senate seats to the sudden appearance of the fae – there
is so much happening in this book, so many players, so many different forces
and factions all plotting together that it was hard to keep track. Sometimes I’d
be reading and I’d wonder who a character was – who was Slava and how did he
fit into things? As Lord Cheung involved? Wait, there are zombies now? Zombies
with acid blood? This necromancer is Louis-Cesare’s old nemesis?
We also have interesting asides of Dorina while in her
vampire persona which is, as I said, a really interesting development in the
nature of what a dhampire actually is, but these are random, often appear
without context (I think to try and make them a surprise, while at the same time
being really obvious what they are) and the seem to be involved in an entirely
other mission behind the scenes which has involved an entirely new faction of
creatures leaving to a whole lot more confusion. I flicked back and forth
several time because these flashbacks talked about finding and saving a child
and I kept thinking I’d forgotten a child somewhere along the way – I assumed
they meant either Stinky had a secret identity or Claire’s baby. It was
confusing. Not only was it confusing, but it meant that some of the actual
principle plot elements – like the Irin and the actual fae plotting – were touched
on far too lightly leaving us not so much with a surprise twist but severe whip
lash.
Then we throw in Dorina’s completely unnecessary angst
over Louis-Cesare and it was too much. I really think this book would have been
immensely improved by being turned into two books and then expanding the points
with a little less of a hectic pace. This huge world and complicated plotting
needs exploring, not sprinting through.
We do have a number of POC in this book. After Dorina,
the most prominent character was probably Ray and his Asian ancestry is
definitely a part of his history albeit not something that seems to influence
his current culture. He’s also free of any particular stereotype, he’s a
roguish risk taker, a criminal without being evil or even especially crooked,
clever without being depicted as a genius or super logical. He’s interesting
and I kind of like him and his growing relationship with Dorina
We also have Zheng, he challenges Dorina and he’s
fighting in the senate battles to gain his own place. He’s lethal, he’s deadly,
he’s cocky and he’s actually kind of fun. Again, he doesn’t appear to be
especially stereotypical – he’s a deadly fighter but that’s as much down to his
power and being a vampire and there’s no real mention or depiction of it being
due to impressive martial arts or shining katana or similar trope. He’s also
depicted as extremely sexual and good looking which is another stereotype
challenging element
With the foreign councils visiting there are Latino,
Black and Asian vampires from their respective territories, each of which are
massively powerful but equally extremely distant. These characters are (in some
ways surprisingly given the treatment of Ray) somewhat stereotypical – or
perhaps Archtypical. The Consul of Africa has been starved in the past and
looks it, he’s surrounded by gun toting soldiers with no real attempt to
conceal the fact they’re soldiers. While the Asian Consul is enigmatic and
silent with powerful mental abilities, surrounded by floating, razor sharp
fans.
We also have some minor POC, background cast, extras, bit
parts; they don’t serve as major elements off inclusion but it is interesting
to see a world where the back ground is also diverse.
On the LGBT side, we have the most definite proof that
Radu is gay without the plausible-deniability issues we’ve had with previous books.
Someone refers to one of Radu’s humans as a “boy toy.” There are certainly more
respectful ways to avoid that “he’s-gay-but-we’re-going-to-sneak-round-it”
issue. Of course, the concrete revelation means that the
stereotyping I’ve complained about in the last two books is just redoubled –
including in this book where Dorina manages to wedge the word “fabulous” twice
in the same piece of exposition about her uncle.
We still don’t have much in the way of other female
characters other than Dorina. She is an excellently complicated character but
moves in a very male world. Her best friend, Claire, lives with her but she
very rarely takes part in the actual book. She’s a background figure; their friendship
is strong but she’s still very distant behind Mircea and Ray and Marlowe and
even Zheng and Radu. After Claire, it’s a very steep drop to the next most
present woman – small parts, maybe important people but not present to a large
degree
In the end, I find that I have made the same comments for
each of these books. An amazing world, a main character I’m really interested
in and a plot line that is quirky, twisty and well worth exploring. But all of
it rushed through without time to digest and so much that could have been even
better if there had been some time to explore it in greater detail which would
also remove some of the sense of the book being so distracted.
