Really warms you up for turning gay-vampire. And, in a series like this, who knows but that Victor might not yet sodomize...
Sequel to the largely vacuous Vampire’s Vow, about Roman centurion Victor Decimus and his gay heartbreak for Jesus. Grab ya?
Previously, Jesus rejected Victor’s fleshly offering, thus turning Victor first into a rampaging murderer, then a vampire intent on wiping out Christian monasteries. Two millennia have passed since then and Victor is still emptying monasteries. Now, he returns to the monastery of San Benedetto in the Eternal City, where he still defies God while lusting for Jesus. Meanwhile, an epileptic Kansas artist, Paul Lewis, finds himself dreaming lustfully of monks and vampires as his plane descends to Rome and to his job as illuminator of a handwritten vellum gospel for the monks of San Benedetto. We meet Victor, now a mock Benedictine, out for his nightly feeding in the Roman alleyways as, first, he sucks dry a handsome young lad, then a prostitute, and then finds himself pursued by the cold spirit of Jana, his dead lover Michael’s Creole grandmother. But this spirit is no colder than Victor himself, who kills even the most beautiful unemotionally, while Paul is all feeling, knows the loss of his ex-lover Rick and wildly fantasizes taking three men in his mouth at once. This heathen homo, Paul tells himself, will have to live on his mental file of fantasies for this monastic year. He meets Victor, who already has thoughts of taking him to the Dark Kingdom, a sensual gay heaven quite unlike Paradise. But Victor resists Paul when he comes onto him. And Victor has arguments with Jesus, who appears to him. But love soon blooms and semen fountains. When Victor makes Paul his thrall, neither living nor undead, a big question forms: Must Victor take off for the Dark Kingdom, leaving Paul behind but fully fledged as a vampire?
Really warms you up for turning gay-vampire. And, in a series like this, who knows but that Victor might not yet sodomize Christ?Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55583-728-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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