Drink Deep by Chloe Neill

Blurb:

Clouds are brewing over Cadogan House, and recently turned vampire Merit can’t tell if this is the darkness before the dawn or the calm before the storm. With the city iself in turmoil over paranormals and the state threatening to pass a paranormal registration act, times haven’t been this precarious for vampires since they came out of the closet. If only they could lay low for a bit, and let the mortals calm down.

That’s when the waters of Lake Michigan suddenly turn pitch black-and things really start getting ugly.

Chicago’s mayor insists it’s nothing to worry about, but Merit knows only the darkest magic could have woven a spell powerful enough to change the very fabric of nature. She’ll have to turn to friends old and new to find out who’s behind this, and stop them before it’s too late for vampires and humans alike.

Review:

First things first.

The series really took off for me with a new start and a brand new set of problems. I like that other factions of supes were introduced in the book. I liked Lorlei the Siren in particular. It was as if Ethan’s death gave the series a new life. I was beginning to think that Merit was unlike Bella and that she was ready to move on with Jonah but as the book progressed….stuff got interesting. I will be the first to admit that I love me some vampires (read:Ezra and Cahal Zeller) but I like that which is dead to stay dead.

I know that a lot of other readers were really happy about the newly resurrected Ethan SUllivan but it didn’t do shit for me.

And Frank….that mother-fucker has a place reserved in hell. He was obnoxious, over-bearing, arrogant, ill-tempered and immature. That was the point, I guess. It was why the dick Darius sent him there in the first place but somethings are just beyond my level of tolerance. Especially when the goddamn righteous people do nothing about it.

The Greenwich Presidium, like any other Empire which is a monopoly and has been in power for too long, is an abusive and hierarchical organization which is only concerned with its own position of power and maintaining that status. They are cruel and abusive to go with it and there is no balance to that. No one to keep them in check except for, apparently, the Red Guard but they haven’t done shit yet. They need to be taken down but no one gets behind it and all of them cower beneath the GP. Its nauseating.

What’s more nauseating is that the Master of the House don’t do shit about it. Masters, I read in the first or the second book of the series, were supposed to protect and care for their subordinates and damn the consequences. But Malik didn’t do shit when Frank put all of his people through that much passive-aggressive torture. Malik is not a good leader.

But all of this doesn’t even come close to the fact that Ethan was magically resurrected by Mallory and Mallory was sacrificed for it. That pisses me off more than anything else. The dead are supposed to stay dead regardless of their species and other things. From here on out, the book took a downturn for me.

The only reason I even finished it was because I needed to know the ending.

Merit has a serious case of martyrism and righteousness and I can’t get behind that.

So this is where I stop with this word torture and hope to hell that I don’t have to go through this again in a book.

0*

Twice Bitten-Chloe Niell

So…on the quest to find books that were as stimulating as the Forever Evermore I stumbled across Chloe Neill and started the Chicagoland Vampires series.

And while Merit doesn’t even come close to Lily Ruckler or Caro Jules, she has a spine, she can dance, she is good with a sword, she has pride and doesn’t chase guys who have made it explicitly clear that they don’t want her.

On the other hand her romanticism of Ethan Sullivan is not something that I can take easily. He keeps hurting her and like a naive little girl she keeps falling for him.

Ethan Sullivan…he fits your typical paranormal hero to a T. Asshole, pretty, standoffish, strong, ‘Master’, revered, ex-gf issues……you get it. While you could debate originality in Merit’s character, Ethan is not at all original and quite frankly, a disappointment. Scarlett Dawn puts effort into making her characters different and she succeeds. But Neill has followed the same line as countless other urban-fantasy authors and, while the book was good, it’s nowhere near best.

The plot was also easy to follow without much suspense or much stimulation coming from any of the characters. The sex scene was written like in one of the YA books. I have to say, Scarlett Dawn and Ilona Andrews do it much better.

This book therefore has a 2* rating from me.