Blood books

[beccaelizabeth]

So I started reading the Tanya Huff Blood books. First I just bought the first one. Then I stayed up to morning to finish reading it all at once, and decided I absolutely must have all of them. So I ordered the others, and now I have them. I just finished reading through Blood Pact.

I'm annoyed.

The first book is about a lady private detective who is adjusting to both a disability and finding out that vampires and demons and all that are real. Adjusting pretty well, and only getting nearly-killed as much as the genre dictates. And then the two books after that she keeps on being kick arse and clever and stuff, and also there's a whole two boyfriends thing which seems to be resolved by just shagging them both, which is the sensible answer and I thoroughly approve.

... By the end of Blood Pact I can no longer approve. The central character is now fundamentally different, and so is the story. And it's no longer the stories I wanted to be reading. There was a story about walking a line, somewhere between the law abiding cop and the old school feudal lord and their different concepts of justice, and then it just up and decided to dive right over the line and go around killing the 'bad' people and have no repercussions. Oh, and incidentally cure her disability. And, okay, replace it with new issues, but they're ones another character had already and I see no extra interest in doubling up. So instead of having disability compared with vampirism or vampire as metaphor for disability or whatever, there's disability replaced by being a vampire. Waved the bloody magic wand again.

I don't want that story. I want the stories I started out reading! So now there were only three of those? Well, four if you count Blood Pact and ignore the ending.

I didn't like the ending. Even ignoring the thing where I didn't want to read about a vampire detective... okay, Henry pretty much counted by then, but that's the point, I didn't want to read about another vampire detective, especially one who's been murdering bad guys to feed on... Ignoring that thing, the ending doesn't fit the expectations set up by the genre or the other three books. The rule is the private detective gets the crap kicked out of them and beats the bad guys with a bit of help from her friends and then recovers in hospital. It doesn't involve getting killed and becoming a vampire.

Note - I'm not saying the author wrote it wrong. Authors can write whatever they want. But what I wanted just went bye-bye, and I'm annoyed.

... also, I have all the other books by this author that I could find ever on their way from Amazon (what? you don't shop that way?) and now I'm worried that they'll all make me annoyed too.

I have the next two Blood books waiting to be read too.

But I also have to get up and go see a play tomorrow, so I can't start one and see what they do next.

That ending though... Grumpy and annoyed.

Comments

[laligin.livejournal.com]

See, I read the first one and got annoyed. If I'm remembering right it was the geek-villain bit? And the geek was so... irritatingly stereotypical I nearly hurled the book across the room?

I am thinking of the right series here, aren't I?

[beccaelizabeth]

yup. the villains are all a bit broad brush, big with the stereotypes. I was giving it slack for being a first book and not getting really annoyed with it, but the others are a bit sketchy too. I guess it saves time.