cimorene

Well, there did seem to be a certain danger of Mary Sue, with a writer new to vampire romance. The back of the novel reveals that the heroine's telepathic and that that is unusual in her universe. She also has a surfeit of attractive suitors, but this seems to be the worst of it all. Most Mary Sue characteristics aren't there. She has social problems with all kinds of people who dislike her; she's not perfect, and in fact frequently needs help from other people.

Everything's in the first person, which is mildly annoying through the entire book if you don't like that sort of thing. The books are actually murder mysteries, though, with vampire romance and vampire politics on the side; and for the most part, the flavor and tone of the writing is very much in line with genre mysteries featuring female protagonists. The first-person narration isn't out of place there, either. It probably has lineage going back to noir PIs in the mystery genre.

On the mystery side of the plot, the development's a little slow because of the romance and Small Town America stuff mixed in. On the romance side, the development is unexpectedly fast and at the same time introducing extra suitors to create a false tension (the vampire is obviously the choice). Also on the romance side, the sex is boring and not hot, which wouldn't be a problem so much - I mean, this is normal in non-romance-genre novels (and in the romance genre it's very much hit or miss and often purple and euphemistic, yes), but they don't generally have so many sex scenes. In an ordinary mystery, the heroine's very active sex life would feature a lot of fade-to-black. Harris doesn't seem to be overly fond of fade to black, and instead devotes a few sentences to most of the encounters in a way that I can only describe as "coy". Actually, I could also describe it as "irritating". It reminds me of nothing so much as romance novels from several decades ago, when the purpose was still to titillate and arouse but the level of graphic detail that's commonplace nowadays wasn't acceptable - solution, coyness. A lot of the word "enter" and the word "until". Perhaps she's trying not to be trashy, or not to stray too far into romance genre or something like that, but in that case, again - make better use of the fade to black. Her coy two-sentence diversions into sex are repetitive and boring.

The heroine is pleasing, though, and the portrait of small town america is interesting and neither offensive nor sugar-coating. She's self-directed, intelligent, human and believable; she accepts help from other people but she's also brave and capable on her own. Her characterisation is quite satisfying for the most part, although she's rather unbelievably thick from time to time when it comes to taking hints and picking up clues. The ending was pretty good, too, I thought, solving the mystery and leaving plenty of other issues open-ended for sequels.

All in all, I give it an A.