Reviewed by Tori (Vicki)

TITLE: All The World’s An Undead Stage 

SERIES: Offbeat Crimes #6

AUTHOR: Angel Martinez

PUBLISHER: Pride Publishing

LENGTH: 200 pages

RELEASE DATE: January 2nd, 2018

BLURB:

Old actors never die shouldn’t be literally true.

Carrington Loveless III, skim-blood vampire and senior officer of Philly’s paranormal police department, has long suspected that someone’s targeting his squad. The increasingly bizarre and dangerous entities invading their city can’t be a coincidence. So when a walking corpse spouting Oscar Wilde attacks one of his officers, Carrington’s determined to uncover the evil mind behind it all.

As a rare books librarian, Erasmus Graham thought he understood some of the stranger things in life. Sharing a life with Carrington’s shown him he didn’t know the half of it. They’ve survived attack books and deadly dust bunnies together and got through mostly unscathed.

Now his world and his vampire’s appear ready to collide again. Books are missing from the rare books’ collection—old tomes of magic containing dangerous summonings and necromancy. He’s certain whoever’s been stalking the Seventy-Seventh is composing their end game.

It’s going to take a consolidated effort from paranormal police, librarians, and some not-quite-authorized civilians to head off the impending catastrophe.

REVIEW:

I’m going to hope if you are clicking on this review, you are familiar with this series. I will just say that this series follows a collection of quirky paranormal beings, who work for the Seventy-Seventh police precinct in Philadelphia. It’s the precinct were all of the broken officers are dumped, the ones with issues with their paranormalness. Over the series, we’ve watched them find lovers, get a grip on their issues, and fight crime.

This story focuses on Carrington the vampire, and Erasmus the librarian, who we first met in book three of this series. But this is really the wrap up to the big picture story about a bad guy after the Seventy-Seventh Precinct. We’ve been following the team over the last couple of books as they have begun to realize there is more to the individual attacks aimed toward them than first appeared. This book introduces us to the end game of the bad guy, as well as a nice wrap up to the love story of Carrington and Erasmus.

I really liked Carrington and Erasmus in their book, and I was happy to see them again in this one. Carrington has had some issues committing to Erasmus, as well as issues with his family, and that all resolved nicely in this book. All while Carrington leads the fight against the bad guy.

Now about the bad guy…. unfortunately I didn’t love this part of the book. I didn’t get why it all was planned, and the culmination of it was pretty anticlimactic. It was also super obvious from early in the book who the perpetrator was. There really was no mystery. Well, the mystery was why, and I still didn’t understand exactly why at the end of the story. There were a couple of little things that bothered me, questions that I felt were not well resolved.

But it was nice to see all of the members of the Seventy-Seventh, I enjoyed catching up with all of them. I’ve mostly liked this series, but I think the earlier books were better. They began to get a little silly after that, to the point that I started rolling my eyes. The non-human entities began to overshadow the human ones, and it impacted my enjoyment of the stories. I did like the various parings, and the unique skills the guys have.

So I liked this one, but it wasn’t my favorite. I liked the character part of the story, Carrington and Erasmus, but the big plot didn’t work as well as it could have. I love Angel Martinez, she has written some of my favorite books, her characters and plots are creative and unique. Even though I didn’t love this one, I still recommend reading this series. The things that bothered me may not bother someone else. So if you are looking for a series full of quirky characters, give these books a try!

RATING:

BUY LINKS:

Pride Publishing

Amazon