LOVE AND BLOODLUST

A descendant of a vampire hunter unexpectedly finds herself falling in love—with a vampire.

In a scene set 255 years before the main plot of Clark’s debut novel, Cain, the fearsome progenitor of all the world’s vampires, is cornered by the operatives of the Order, who are dedicated to protecting humanity against such fanged creatures. However, the complete destruction of Cain is beyond the Order’s capabilities, and he lays a curse on the Order’s leader, William Langdon, promising that all of the human’s descendants will die by Cain’s hand. The time frame then shifts to the present day, when one of those descendants, a young woman named Avery Langdon in Big Rapids, Michigan, is saved from a vampire by her friend Rose, a current member of the Order. Later, Avery meets a very attractive and mysterious stranger named Talon Campbell at a bar: “Any other woman in her position would have had her knees turned to jelly and her brain to mush at the sight of his grin.” Talon, it turns out, is a centuries-old vampire, but he hates and hunts his own kind. The two meet just as a revenant Cain and his minions are working to assemble a collection of supernatural objects that will allow them to effectively reinvent vampires—by removing their legendary vulnerabilities and rendering them nearly indestructible. Fans of modern vampire tales will find much of this one to be intensely familiar; it particularly calls to mind the adventures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Buffy Summers and her centuries-old vampire beau, Angel. That said, Clark travels this well-trod ground with considerable narrative energy and a keen ear for dialogue. Her weakness as a storyteller, however, is her lack of subtlety. The heroes are unbelievably good, with few shades of gray; the villains are nothing but evil; and the plot developments tend to be telegraphed. Still, the book remains an appealing page-turner, even if the events on some of those pages are rather predictable.

An often engaging, if formulaic, supernatural story of an unlikely couple racing to defeat an ancient evil.