I was up late the other night with a poorly kitty, so I ended up reading a book. It’s not like me to read something when I’m in the middle of editing one of my own paranormal romance books, but I started reading this book when I was waiting for my husband to finish doing something and ended up reading the whole thing. I really don’t know how to put books down once I start them. It’s not a reflection of the book’s quality. It’s a reflection of my OCD type nature.
I had been milling around the Amazon Kindle freebies recently and found that Michele Hauf had another one offered for free, so I downloaded it when I saw it and had it stored on my HTC Desire HD smart phone and my Amazon Kindle 3 waiting to be read.
Here’s my candid review:
Her Vampire Husband
Michele Hauf
An arranged marriage between a werewolf and a vampire.
There will be blood.
She may resist his bite, but she can’t resist his charms…
Werewolf princess Blu Masterson won’t allow her seductive vampire husband to consummate their marriage with his bite, marking her forever. Alone in a secluded estate with her sworn enemy, Blu curses the marriage arranged to bring their rival nations together, especially since Creed Saint-Pierre calls out to her most feral desires.
When Blu uncovers her pack’s secret plot to destroy the vampire nation—and Creed—she is forced to confront her growing feelings for her sexy undead husband. Will she choose the only life she’s ever known or accept his vampire bite?
REVIEW
I went into reading Her Vampire Husband expecting it to be much like Kiss Me Deadly—not amazing, light paranormal romance. I think my opinion on the book benefitted from this, but I do also believe that it was a much better offering than Kiss Me Deadly by the same author, Michele Hauf.
Blu Masterton is a werewolf princess with her knickers in a twist because her father has arranged to marry her off to old and powerful vampire, Creed Saint-Pierre, in order to form a tentative truce between the werewolf and vampire nations. Creed Saint-Pierre isn’t exactly thrilled with the arrangement either but he sucks it up because he knows it’s the right thing to do given the circumstances, and it will benefit the vampires by giving them time to put their plan into action. Of course, once the couple sets eyes on each other and share their first kiss as husband and wife at the top of the aisle, things swiftly progress into a blossoming romance between the two.
It was a little too swift for my liking and once they start snogging and bonking, they can’t seem to stop. It’s rapid fire sketchy love scenes all the way. We’re told that the hatred between vampires and werewolves runs deep, but these two get over their apparent dislike of the other’s species fairly quickly and with minimal internal struggle. It all happened a bit too easily to be satisfying. I was expecting a good fight, a battle of emotions inside the characters, or at least some more realistic conflict.
The story is also quite light on plot, and things are fairly predictable, although I did like the back story of Blu and the little historical notes on Creed’s life that are dripped in throughout the book. I liked the hero but feel he should have stuck to his principles a bit more and fought his desire for a little longer before playing lapdog to the heroine. The heroine, Blu, irritated me sometimes. The language she used and the way she behaved felt like a blatant attempt by Ms. Hauf to make the heroine appear very young and wild. I think it was the language that irked me most. If I heard the word ‘dude’ one more time I might have taken a seething dislike to the heroine.
The writing wasn’t stellar, but it was okay. There were a few moments where words just didn’t seem right and felt out of place, or the way she had worded it had me reading the same sentence five times to make heads or tails of it. There were also times when I felt the author could have put more effort into the description. The fight scenes in particular didn’t really grab me. I wanted to be able to picture what was happening but couldn’t. I also think some of the characters would have benefitted from better description. There’s a lot of mentioning the clothing of the hero and heroine, and some about the looks, but a lot of the supporting characters don’t get much description. I know from personal experience that you can’t describe minor characters in detail without getting bogged down, but there were characters in this I would have classed as secondary characters, who had enough air time in the book that they deserved better description.
All in all, I’m going to give this a solid three. I might have been tempted to up it to a 3.5 if I had liked the heroine more. This book also benefitted from being free on Amazon Kindle. If it hadn’t been a freebie, I probably wouldn’t have read it as I wasn’t tempted to continue with the author after reading Kiss Me Deadly.
Read reviews of Her Vampire Husband on Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7025989-her-vampire-husband
