A Blood Seduction (Vamp City, #1)

by Pamela Palmer

[Melanie]

My review and an extended sample of the audiobook are posted at Hotlistens.com.

A Blood Seduction is another novel that I’ve already read, but was extremely excited to revisit in audio. I remember when I first picked up the first book in the Vamp City series. Now that The Vamp City novels are on audio, I jumped at the chance to revisit the series on audio before the third book comes out later this year.

Even though this was a revisit for me, I still was very impressed with this story. I had remember that this was a very dark story, but it was darker than I remember. Quinn Lennox is a scientist in the Washington DC area. She lives with her brother who is still in college. Quinn has always had weird things happen to her, but they have been getting worse. Weird things like her clothing changing colors, and more dramatic things when she was a child. She was able to shove her stepmother without ever touching her, but not since she was very young. Now, there are several people from the DC area who’ve gone missing. When Quinn’s brother’s friend goes missing things turn really dark.

Vamp City is an alternate world that is kinda like a parallel universe to DC. When Quinn and her brother slip through the cracks between the two worlds that learn that while the structures are very similar, the world is completely different. Vamp City is a copy of DC from 1800’s, so there are differences with current DC. There is also the vampires. These vamps are nothing like vampires that you’ve read about in other books. Not only do the feed on blood, but they also feed on emotions, which will vary from vamp to vamp. Most that we see feed on pain or fear, but there are also pleasure feeders. So these vamps take humans and deliberately scare the crap out of them to feed of their fear or they will burn them, slash wounds and worse to cause pain.

If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you know that I’m no stranger to dark stories and that I really enjoy them. If you read my reviews of Ms. Palmer’s Feral Warriors series, you know that I thought those books were very dark, especially for PNR. These books are even darker than those. There is rape and torture that is pretty graphic, so be warned. If you like dark stories, I highly recommend this series. I have book two and will be starting it soon.

Narration
This is the first book that I’ve listened to with Rebecca Estrella as the narrator. I don’t think she did a bad job. I was not disappointed for the most part. I thought her pacing and tone were pretty good. The different character voices were done well. My only issue was that this story is so dark, I didn’t think this narrator’s voice brought out that darkness.

I like to thank Tantor Audio for providing me with a copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.