Read for the RIP IV and Vampire Reading Challenges.
This book is best summed up as: Henry and Mike fight over Vicki, now with the undead!
Undead joking aside, this book was clearly the source material whenever anyone on the TV show needed to deal with Henry and Mike’s prickly relationship, and it’s great fun.
Vicki’s mother has passed away, and the boys have to set aside their mutual distaste to be supportive during this difficult time. It doesn’t help that Vicki’s mother knew she was dying, and never told Vicki. Things ramp into high gear at the funeral, when it’s discovered that her mother’s body is missing.
The books of this series unfold with parallel stories of team Vicki and the bad guy de jour, so the reader always knows what’s going on, even if Team Vicki hasn’t figured it out yet. What makes this book great is that the bad guy isn’t a demon or a mummy, or any of the other supernatural bad guys available in this world. Instead, it’s a group of university researchers that have figured out how to reanimate dead flesh, and are going a little bit too far in the pursuit of scientific inquiry. Catherine, the slightly off balance grad student that discovered the means of reanimating the dead, is a beautifully drawn character, and the most fun of that bunch.
However, the bad guys are really the side story here. This book is about Vicki, and her inability to choose between Mike Cellucci and Henry Fitzroy. I dare say that she would never have been able to choose between the two of them, until circumstances forced a choice. And I definitely didn’t see those circumstances coming at the end of this book. I absolutely can’t wait to see what happens next, and knocked the next book in the series up to the front of my Paperspine queue in record time. It’s definitely the relationships between the main characters that make this series, and things on that front are really getting good!