Friday, May 11, 2012

Lynsay Sands' "Under a Vampire Moon"

I waited for quite some time for this book.  From his first appearance in the series, I loved Christian Notte.  I was so excited to finally read his story.  Sadly, though, I was disappointed.

(Stop here if you don't like hearing about what happens in a book before you read it.)

The basic premise is this:  a friend drags Carolyn Connor to St. Lucia for a vacation while waiting for her divorce to finalize.  She meets Marguerite, who senses that Carolyn is Christian's lifemate and volunteers his band to come play there so he can find her.  This would have been an intriguing set-up, especially since immortals don't do well with sunny locations, except for one other plot device.  Knowing that Carolyn is bothered by how young Christian seems to be, the family tells her that he's gay and gets her to be his pretend girlfriend as a cover.

I suppose even that wouldn't have bothered me too much if it hadn't lasted for about 50-60% of the book. Seriously.  Carolyn stupidly believes he is gay for over half of the story.  He in no way acts gay.  He even kisses her a couple of times, which she somehow manages to dismiss.  The plot device grew old fast.  It is hard to feel a connection between characters when one of them is so seriously misinformed about the other.  It is also hard to create chemistry, and these two seriously lacked it.  I found myself disliking Carolyn because she was just so oblivious.

Now for the real spoilers.

The end of the book was the worst.  In the last quarter of the story, Christian finally tells Carolyn he isn't gay. Her reaction?  To paraphrase, "I can't believe he lied.  Oh wait, he's hot.  Let's just have sex."  Then she finds out he's an immortal and flees back to her vacation villa.  He comes over, tells her he's not a bad vampire, and she just accepts it.  It almost reads like "I can't believe you're a vampire.  Oh wait, you're hot.  Let's just have sex."

THEN we learn that her friend Bethany, the one who brought her, was trying to get her to commit suicide so that Bethany could hook up with Carolyn's almost-ex after he inherited Carolyn's fortune.  Wait, what?  Where did this even come from?  There were vague hints of this kind of thing, but it doesn't come up until maybe the last 2-3 pages.  Carolyn puts Bethany on the phone with another friend, and then she and Christian just leave.  That's it.  The end.  I literally flipped between pages a few times wondering if part of the ending had been lost, but the preview of her next book was there, so I'm guessing not.

From the awkward interactions between characters to the abrupt, unbelievable ending, I was extremely disappointed by this book.  I typically love Lynsay Sands' work, so it makes me doubly sad to give a book of hers a poor review.  Unless you really can't stand not reading every book in a series, I recommend giving this one a pass.