Sean Barrs 's Reviews > The Book of Life

This series went from mediocre to bad to terrible over a course of three books.

The main problem is the author clearly didn’t think anything through. She can write well; her prose is quite flashy in places and some of her characters are quite intriguing. The first book was a great idea and it really set the tone and got the plot moving, the problem was from there the author clearly had no idea what to do.

In Shadow of Night Diana found herself transported back in time to the Elizabethan era. (You what?) And if that wasn’t bad enough, we never really get the answers we were promised as this book ends. I’m left wondering why the hell it all happened and what purpose any of it served. It’s like the author throws cheep thrill after cheep thrill to whip the plot into motion rather than dealing with elements she started with. Not a good way to write a book.

But the thing that really made this book terrible was vampire Mathew. He is the most useless, hapless, pointless, ineffectual and weak blood-sucker that has ever existed in fiction. Why the protagonist is attracted to him I’ll never know, the relationship always felt forced. There was no chemistry. What makes him so frustrating is his inability to do anything. When danger arises, he proves useless. When there is problem to solve, he may as well not be present despite his age and supposed intelligence.

What makes it worse is his angry episodes known all so creatively (cough cough) as blood rages. When one strike Mathew goes mad and kills everything in the vicinity, even beings that should be more powerful than him. He harnesses this power at the worst imaginable opportunities and becomes an even bigger hindrance, for example, when he kills off the most compelling character in the book. So, he is one big infuriating liability.

Harkness tries to wrap everything together at the end, but because there are far too many tangents it becomes a monumental effort of overwriting as long forgotten about characters are brought into the fray. It was forced. It was bad. And I laughed all the way through it. And not for the right reasons.