First off, I was voluntarily provided this free review copy audiobook by the author, narrator, or publisher.
If I had a friend who also enjoyed gay paranormal vampires-and-sorcery romance — I don’t, but this is hypothetical — I’d recommend this book only half-heartedly. At the end of the book is a plug for the sequel, at which point I reclassified this one as a prequel and it made a lot more sense. Ironically the sequel is not yet available on Audible. I’ll probably listen to the sequel at some point, having paid my dues here.
“What dues?” you say. This book’s got a lot going for it in the “spice” department: demons, sorcerers, mysteries, vampires, tragedies, sibling problems. It has murder most foul and an evil villain who gets his just deserts. It features a gay Montague-and-Capulet romance without all the suicide. It sprinkles in pretty good sex scenes every chance it gets, which might be a recommendation or a warning depending on your taste. It has a cute small animal. But there’s just not a lot of meat for all that spice.
The problem, the lack of anything I could really sink my teeth into (sorry…) I think comes from it being, as I said, a prequel. The book’s trying hard to build and fill out a world where vampires and necromancers are no more noteworthy than accountants and where it seems almost every male between the age of consent and 1500 years is gay. This, by the way, would explain the conspicuous lack of female characters — women had very reasonably abandoned Boston.
This is a place where where the police responding to a demon attack are more interested in the roadwork damage caused by the banishing than in the fact that there was a demon to be banished in the first place.
Interspersed in this world-building and backstory-telling we’re getting a complicated explication of how magic works in this world. The result is that there are sections of the book where the poor characters might get to say a single sentence and then be interrupted by a half-dozen lines of history/theory/commentary. That’s a fault in the choice of structure for the story; yes, it’s faster to haul the reader off and fill them in like a Duck Tour docent but it’s more satisfying to be on a stroll with a knowledgeable friend. And it seems to me only courteous to let characters have a simple conversation without long digressions. I felt bad for them.
I’ll credit the narrator with a good job on material made challenging by the diverse accents of the cast. Our main character is a foul-mouthed short-tempered gay Bostonian aristocrat sorcerer who just needs to be put down for a nap. (I kept hearing Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons with coprolalia.) His love interest is a 400-year-old Irish vampire.. There’s an upper-class British vampire. A Southern Georgia vampire. A French vampire. A mostly-dead and somewhat freeze-dried uncle. A huge demon. An annoying boyfriend. Several Irish policemen. Some disposable hissy vampires. And two, count them, two, female characters who had lines. The characters’ voices and accents were distinct and consistent. The narration voice was languid and, though initially overly-sibilant to my ear, pleasant enough after some time.
The epilogue sets up the grumpy necromancer as a PI equipped with a vampire boyfriend/sidekick, an apprentice, a relative, a familiar, and a regular Irish policeman on his team.
As I said, despite the flaws in this book, the sequel is probably in my future. I hope that subsequent books don’t share the same flaws. We’ve got a crime-solving necromancer and his undead sidekick partner. “Pushing Up Daisies” was a favorite show of mine. How can I not be interested?