De la Cruz does an impressive job of creating a world of high society New York vampires that date all the way back to Plymouth, to the beginning of time, really, but the book focuses on Plymouth. I loved that she ties her story into a bit of real historical mystery, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, a group of early pilgrim settlers that disappeared without a trace. Family lines and real estate and designer clothes are all important to setting the stage for the New York it crowd, but the name-dropping brands got old about page two. De la Cruz got a little too caught up in her fashion background and forgot that we want to read a story, not see a fashion spread in Vogue.

But that wasn't the thing that bugged me the most about her vampire lore. The angel Gabriel come down from heaven to live as a self-important New York vampire? Did she really have to go there? Twist vampire traditions and angel stories, but please don't mess with sacred scriptural figures. Anything I may have believed about her world lost it for me there.

That bombshell came as a weak answer to an unsatisfying ending. I get that de la Cruz is introducing a series here so there has to be some things left open, but the main struggle I invested 300 pages for should have given me some conclusion, some closure, some reason for this to be the end of this story, but nothing really resolves itself and the answers I did get were weak. There were some interesting aspects to the story and I liked Schuyler (if none of the other characters), but among so many vampire stories there's nothing here that compelled me to read the rest of the series.