Review: Love Bites by Lynsay Sands

I found myself with some time last weekend after my birthday party, so I decided to indulge in some reading and ended up deciding to give Lynsay Sands a second chance and read the next book in her series. I devoured Love Bites, a paranormal vampire romance book, in one sitting. This book was made infinitely better by the fact it was the first I read on my shiny new Kindle 3, and therefore I attribute some of the rating I gave it in the end to the excitement of owning such a wicked good e-reader!

Here’s my candid review:

Love Bites
Lynsay Sands
Etienne Argeneau’s three hundred years of bachelorhood are at an end. He can only “turn” one human in his lifetime, and most of his kind reserved that power for creating a life mate. He has to save Rachel Garrett. He doesn’t know her very well, but the beautiful coroner had saved his life. To save hers he would make her immortal. Rachel Garrett awakes surprised. All she’d wanted was to get off the night shift at the morgue; now here she is staggering to her feet naked and in a strange place. Then she sees the man of her dreams emerging from his…coffin? She just hopes he tastes as good as he looks.

Review
Love Bites is a far better offering than the first book in the series, A Quick Bite, and is probably suitable for readers looking for a lighter paranormal romance who don’t mind sacrificing plot for the sake of their warm fuzzies and who can overlook some fairly glaring wrong words and poor editing (whoever missed some of these errors should be shot).

Etienne Argeneau doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem that a deranged psychopath is trying to kill him. In fact, he finds it quite amusing and a harmless bit of fun that he keeps ending up in the morgue. Rachel Garret is the night coroner who runs into Etienne’s corpse twice throughout the story. The first time he convinces her that she’s hallucinating because of her flu, and the second time she saves his life from the nutjob who, unsatisfied with the charred remains he turned Etienne into, has come to finish his work with an axe. Cue Rachel trying to save Etienne’s life and having a brush with death that is only stopped by Etienne giving her his blood. Welcome to life as a vampire. The rest of the book passes pretty much in Etienne’s home as he tries to keep Rachel around by giving her bad blood that she therefore can’t stomach and won’t leave him because she thinks she’s a clutz and can’t feed, rather than seeing the truth of the matter–the man who apparently loves her is poisoning her with the crappy drugdealer / homeless people blood unfit for consumption by his kind. Nice. Very romantic. To say anything else would be to give away pretty much the whole book since the plot is flimsy as usual with this series.

It’s a quick read and the character development in this novel is certainly better than in the first, although the plot seemed terribly familiar towards the end. It seems Ms Sands likes to have her protagonists kidnapped in order to give a little conflict to the story. The characters are more likeable though, and I did find that the hero had a certain attractiveness about him and wasn’t as flat and one dimensional as the hero in the first book. I’m not sure whether this is just because he’s a vampire this time and therefore inherently more interesting to me.

I think this is a series that will improve as it progresses and hopefully the writing and editing will too. I don’t really have much else to say about it. If you don’t mind a flimsy plot and very little conflict, and want something that basically equates to fluff, with a hero who isn’t too vapid and flat but could use his masculinity / alpha side pumping up a touch, then you’ll probably enjoy this.

I’m giving it three stars because it’s a vast improvement on the first book, which gained a single star from me.

It’s a throwaway quick read but not wholly satisfying.

Read reviews of Love Bites by Lynsay Sands on Goodreads: 
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38548.Love_Bites

About Felicity Heaton

I'm a NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY best-selling author writing passionate paranormal romance books as Felicity Heaton and F E Heaton. In my books I create detailed worlds, twisting plots, mind-blowing action, intense emotion and heart-stopping romances with leading men that vary from dark deadly vampires to sexy shape-shifters and wicked werewolves, to sinful angels and hot demons! If you're a fan of paranormal romance authors Lara Adrian, Larissa Ione, Kresley Cole, J R Ward, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Gena Showalter and Christine Feehan then you will love my books too.

This entry was posted in book reviews. Bookmark the permalink.