When I was offered the chance to read Linda Mercury's Dracula's Secret via NetGalley, I jumped at the chance. The premise was too tempting to resist: Dracula was actually born a woman and had posed as a man for centuries. Unfortunately, this book appears to be mostly premise and falls short on execution. I tried valiantly to hang in there, but there's just too much going on and not enough tying it together.

Ostensibly, Valerie Tate is the fabled Dracula. After discovering that vampires she'd created were used to further Hitler's goals during World War II, she vows to kill all of them, including her brother, who had acted in her name. Of course, this makes no sense, because she was also working for Hitler and appears to have no plans to off herself.

The story is told via alternating timeframes: present-day, where she is hunting the last vampire on her list, her brother, and bits of the past. Gore plays a heavy role with no apparent explanation, and the author appears fond of dropping hints (for instance, Valerie managed to have a wife at some point and deflowered the wife with her/his "ivory erection" which isn't explained, probably to get the reader to keep reading) but then passing them over to hurry back to the present, where Valerie is rapidly falling into insta-love with the head of a homeless shelter.

I really was determined to keep reading, even past the point where I'd have dropped most books, simply because of the premise, but the descriptions of the erotic points were beyond my tolerance level. Phrases like "hot crotch," "thumping erection," and, by all that's holy, "behind his testicles" draw a reader out of the eroticism of a scene and into an "eyew." Coupled with the introduction of Nazis to a plot of an erotic novel and gratuitous gore (and trust me, I don't mind gore when it advances the plot), I saw no hope for the remaining two-thirds of this novel, much to my disappointment.