Bound by Night was set in the world where vampires are slaves to mankind and the story set around Nicole who own the corporation that trade domestic vampires but choose to study vampire vaccine because of her past when her family was killed and nearly left her dead. On the other hand, Riker was the husband of Nicole’s maid who died and seeking revenge against Nicole and kidnapped her as a ransom for the corporation to release a vampire female in captive.
I do love Larissa Ione’s Lord of Deliverance series and was looking forward to this latest instalment of hers. But I couldn’t find myself enjoying the vampire story as I should be. I think it because I do have a medical science experience to dispute and make fun of the science in this book and that to a degree, the book is frankly unbelievable and similar to the mess of Christine Feehan’s medical vampire science. I mean, there’s fertility problems with the vampires and there’s the magical female main character who is a vampire researcher and also the owner of the evil vampire corporation who was lead by her half brother who want to kill her and there’s vampires turning on their kinds and there’s romance and sex and I couldn’t help but thinking I’m rereading the Dark Carpathian series again but thats even better with dark magic soil parasite making everyone sterile.
The dialogues are witty and creative but Nicole is a special snowflake or perfect circumstance woman trope and apparently everyone is okay that she was responsible with multiple of vampire cruelty with her ignorance. Of course there’s a scene where she was blamed to order a massacre in one of the laboratory and of course, the book evaded to the fact that while she crying out that she’s innocent due to her ignorance and have been trying to change the vampire rules to the better, But I can’t seem to buy her sudden lapse in judgement particularly when initially she’s a vampire hater and treat vampires like laboratory animals even worst that I did. She did admitted doing experiments on vampire corpse because she’s a researcher and I am legally trained biomedical researcher and NEVER even touch a real corpse in the name of science and I was baffled by her sudden development with an MD in vampire medicine and can do vampire first aid and end up solving some of the vampire medical problems. As far as realism goes, this is more than being far-fetched.
I even couldn’t quite buy into the romance aspect of the novel. Both of the characters essentially hate each other. Riker hated Nicole and her family for enslaving the vampires and killing his wife while Nicole hated Riker for killing her friend and hated the vampires for killing her family. Apparently mutual sexual attraction develop into love story in this book. Of course, the male main character couldn’t handle his feelings for his hated enemy and things even goes more downhill from there.
I couldn’t buy the final scene of this book (and I couldn’t emphasize more without it being a spoiler) but I do end up liking the MoonBound Clan’s Hunter who is a first born vampire (and work as a bridge between the Demonica series) and he will be in ‘Chained by Night’ when he was forced to mate with one of the rival clan’s daughter and there’s a prophecy and something. But The other book will be out August 2014 and it will be a long wait until then. Was this book a must read? For fans, of course but for casual vampire romance readers, this book can be campy and like I said, the nearest you can get from reading Christine Feehan’s books.
The ARC is provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Musings : Reviews 