Cronin's Key (#2) by N.R. Walker

[Ulysses]

Cronin’s Key II (French Edition)
By N.R. Walker
Published by the author, 2015
Four stars

N.R. Walker has a rich imagination. The whole book, like the first volume, is one big spoiler waiting to happen. The crazy plot is the whole point, and I can’t divulge the really good stuff.

Alec MacAiden is the key, Cronin’s key—but apparently the key to much more. Having been whisked out of the human world of police work, he is more or less an outlaw, but with no regrets, other than the unexpected dangers that seem to keep arising from the revelation of his unanticipated role in the vampire world—the only human ever bound by destiny to a vampire—and a really powerful, twelve-hundred-year-old Scottish vampire.

What Cronin and Alec discover, to the dismay of their friends Jodis and Eiji, is that their intense bond with each other is only getting stronger, not “settling down” as everyone expects. What’s more, since Alec cannot be transformed, and thus Cronin can drink his blood (yeah, it’s a little kinky), there seem to be things happening that nobody understands.

And, by the way, there seems to be another existential threat from another ancient, long-dead vampire. Neither Alec nor Cronin understand where these threats are coming from, nor why—only that it’s something in Alec’s blood, and something that they’ll have to deal with.

Walker’s literary ability to grant her vampires special powers (think Mutants in X-Men) is a very self-indulgent way to open up the whole blood-drinker myth to new and marvelous possibilities. With the confines of physical geography torn away, Alex, Cronin and their friends can go anywhere and do anything whenever they want—or need to. Together, this plucky gang begin to realize that Alec is at the center of something really big, potentially earth-shattering, that has roots even older than anyone knew.

This was enough fun that I had to buy the third book.