Reviewed by Donna
TITLE: Mosquito District
AUTHOR: Leona Bentley
PUBLISHER: Less Than Three Press
LENGTH: 150 Pages
RELEASE DATE: May 29, 2019
BLURB:
Lee is a jaded young man living in a district owned and overseen almost exclusively by vampires. When he mouths off to one of their flunkies, his life loses all of its carefully constructed order. His next shift at the library where he works brings Ira, a millennia-old vampire who is new to that part of the world and looking for answers that Lee just might be able to help uncover—if they can learn to trust one another.
REVIEW:
From the cover to the settings to the storyline, this book was delightfully dark, depressing and dreary. Well, actually, the plot wasn’t dreary, but I thought that bit of alliteration worked well together, so I just ran with it.
This story has an almost post-apocalyptic feel to it, with our main character Lee barely managing to eek out a living in a rundown, one bedroom apartment he shares with his brother and his brothers’ girlfriend. The city is run by vampires, many of whom hold little regard for the humans who live beneath their rule. Unfortunately for Lee, he has a bad habit of running off his snarky mouth at any vampire who looks at him funny. Mosquitoes, as he insists on calling them, are not deserving of his respect. But then he meets Ira, and though Lee can tell that there’s something fishy going on, for the first time ever he finds himself attracted to a vampire.
I absolutely adored the interaction between Ira and Lee. At times I wondered if the snarking would get to be too much, but I think the author balanced it just right with everything else that was going on. In terms of the romance, I didn’t feel that it was the major focus of the story, but that could just be because the secretive goings-on of the vampires had snared my attention so well. The way the author wrote this book, keeping Ira so mysterious throughout, I never really felt certain that Lee was completely safe with him. And I liked that. Obviously, the book is a romance, so a happy ending is pretty much guaranteed, but there was still an element of danger every time the two main characters were together.
Though the city the story is set in is all kinds of depressing, I totally enjoyed reading about the bleak world the characters existed in, and I hope that this actually is the first book in a new series, as the title suggests. Fingers crossed that a second book would continue the story of Lee and Ira, but there are a couple of other characters who could totally do with some love.
RATING:
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