Reviewed by Carissa

TITLE:  Temper Sanguine

SERIES:  Sanguine #2

AUTHOR:  Lou Harper

PUBLISHER:  Samhain Publishing

LENGTH:  213 pages

BLURB:  

“One bite won t kill you. Unless it does. ”

Gabe Vadas’s slayer ancestors would be spinning in their graves if they knew that not only is his boss a vampire, so is his lover. But that lover, Harvey Feng, is cooking something up in his lab that he seems reluctant to disclose.

The secrets they keep from each other and the nightmares they share are driving a wedge between them.

Harvey fell off the vegetarian wagon with one taste of his lover s blood. Except recently it s been having some unusual and disturbing side effects. And he fears their connection has awakened something dark and dangerous.

Sent to New York City to help the new top vamp clean up the mess the old one left behind, Gabe finds more than a few stray feral vampires. A doctor with a dubious history is hell-bent on creating a new race of unkillable bloodsuckers.

The investigation takes Gabe and Harvey across an ocean, and deep into the past. Where they discover demons that have the power to reach across the centuries to destroy them both.

Warning: Contains a tasty Hungarian goulash of dirty boys doing dirty things, bilingual dirty talk, evil scientists, shifty-eyed lab assistants, fun with lab rats, and smexy times in romantic Old Europe. “Jo etvagyat!

REVIEW:  

Harvey and Gabe are back…and this time they’ve brought vampire rats!

(Ok, so the vampire rats don’t play a humongous part in this story, but I can’t help but feel that Harvey is one cage mishap away from a full-on Vampiric Infestation of Chicago: Rat Edition!)

Coming off of their trip to Vegas, Harvey and Gabe have been left with more questions than they have answers.  They’ve got mysterious poker-chips, shadowy figures, and some rather uncomfortable truths about both Gabe and Harvey’s pasts.  But there is not much that they can do about all that, other than wait for the next shoe to drop.  Until then, Harvey has his various experiments to continue, and Gabe is still working as personal slayer to the head vampire of Chicago.  It is not a dull life, that’s for sure.

But when Augustine sends the duo to New York as a favor to an old friend, they might just start to get some of those elusive answers.  Too bad that those answers might just lead them back into danger, and across the seas to Gabe’s old slaying ground.  With Harvey keeping secrets, and something old and dark hiding in the shadows, Gabe might just have to rely on luck and some questionable allies to pull this whole mess off.

This book was hot, dark, dangerous, and a lot of fun.  Did I mention hot? Because it was.  I don’t know what it is about Harvey, Gabe, and their role-playing games that turns my crank so heavily, but I found myself heating up in all the very nicest of ways, throughout this book.

I really liked how all those questions that had started to pop up at the end of Spirit Sanguine have deepened in this book.  You get some answers, but mostly it is more twists, more questions, and more bad guys to slay.  And the trip to Hungary was nice–though a lot of the time I had no idea what they were saying when they lapsed out of English.  Clearly a lot more has been going on than Gabe or Harvey ever suspected, and even though they are seeing some of the things that have led up to now, there is a lot more going on that they have no idea how to handle.

I loved the cast of characters that pop up in this book. Some old, some new, but all of them very well written.  And the new locations, especially Hungary, were great.  I have to agree with Harvey, though, that language is impossible.  It was cool to see it, but sometimes it got a little frustrating not knowing what was being said on the page.  But it made it feel all the more real, so I don’t feel too annoyed with it over all.

This book was just a lot of fun to read, and while I wanted to smack Harvey something awful, all the various aspects of this book combined very well.  I am a huge fan of Lou Harper, and I really do recommend you pick up this book.  You might want to read the first one before picking up it up, though–even if Harper did a good job of reminding us of key points.  I can’t wait to see what is up for these guys next.

RATING:  

BUY LINKS:

Samhain

Amazon