Declan Finn's Live and Let Bite

(You can check both myself and Declan Finn out at the webcast he hosts and I appeared on. I promised him a blog at the time that the webcast was originally supposed to happen but my net has been down all day, so I'm a little late. Sorry Declan!)

First off the warning: Yes Live and Let Bite is book three. Yep, that means  there are two books before it. You should check them out too. I've reviewed them here and here. They're worth checking out. I mention this simply because you're going to want to read the first two books before reading this one. I really enjoyed this book and I'll talk about why below, but I'm not at all certain that this book would work as well as a stand-alone. There are a lot of references to what has come previously and it may be a bit confusing if you're not familiar. This is not a bad thing. It just means that you need to start at the beginning.

 Live and Let Bite is the story of our hero, Marco Catalano and our heroine Amanda Colt, the world's finest female vampire and their battle against existential evil. This time our evil takes the form of an ancient vampire assassin. She is a little off mentally and very impressive physically. In a universe where the bane of vampires is fire she takes a daisy cutter to the face and keeps running. She shrugs off things that should kill her and just keeps fighting.

Let's take a second to talk about our villain: Nualla is dark and mysterious. She  comes straight at Marco and he doesn't know why. She may work for a Council which may or may not exist. What we do know is that she is definitely an evil vampire (and one of the things I really like about these books is that vampires exist on a scale similar to the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system) who is extremely powerful and has a vendetta against Marco. The reason she gives (nope, not gonna spoil it) is nebulous at best and helps set up the next book (which will get here soon, I hope).

I don't generally do spoilers. They're not my thing. But I'm going to break the rule here: MARCO AND AMANDA ACTUALLY GET TOGETHER!!! And FINN DID IT RIGHT. When an author hints long term at a relationship it always makes me nervous when they finally let it happen. It often turns into a total cheesefest. The last episode of JAG comes to mind here. But Finn makes it believable. He makes it fun. He makes it awesome. This is a payoff worth waiting for. How things are going to work between a twenty-five year old mortal and a century old vampire is yet to be seen but at least they've admitted that they're both interested. Things are still in the early stages but I can't wait to see where this goes.

Finn once again delivers with the fight scenes. They're well planned out and vicious. I would not want to meet these guys in a dark alley. Well, meeting Marco in a back alley might not be all that bad. He tends to save the innocent, but the villains in this book are bad news. I do have a kind of complaint here though.

Marco and company have a tendency to prepare a battle space to a "T". This makes sense but it seems that once they've prepped a space the fight always goes the way they thought they would or at least close enough. The enemy gets a say in what happens and sometimes I think Finn forgets that. That doesn't mean it's not exciting. It doesn't mean that the good guys have won just because they think they've won. It's just really tightly plotted.

Finn has a healthy disrespect for government and it comes through. One of our main characters reveals that they were a government agent hunting the supernatural in the nineties and got downsized. Now another of our favorites has become the new guy with a much smaller department and budget.  So even with the lives of its citizen on the line, the US government found an excuse to cut the budget.  I'm  sure they managed to give a few phones away with the savings though. I got a good chuckle out of that.

A huge part of what I enjoyed about this book was that it always looks forward. Finn is building something here. The storyline is racing ahead and things are hinted at. There is a constant interest building. Finn is building a world one step at a time here. Things are opening up slowly and I'm following along amazed. He has very obviously planned out an extended plot going on here.

I did a post awhile back about Hollywood and some books that need to be turned into movies. In this case though, I'm going to suggest that maybe this series gets the Game of Thrones treatment. There's a television series here. I mean that. We may need to give Finn a bit of time to get a little further ahead before it gets started but this makes sense as a series. It's written that way and it works that way. I have zero pull in Hollywood but if I ever get some (about as likely as my getting hit by lightning twice on the same day as I hit the lottery) I'm going to make Finn an offer for this one.


So anyways, I'm totally waiting for the next one. Hopefully it will be here soon. I want to find out what the bigger threat is. I'm wondering if I'm right in predicting that we're going to see Marco go through a Luke Skywalker type storyline in the near future. His attitudes, his love for a vampire lass and Finn's alignment system have me wondering if we're not going to see a redemption story soon. We'll see how that goes. I'm anxious to see if I'm right.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Vials of Holy Water

Live and Let Bite is available for purchase at the link below. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

Declan Finn's Demons are Forever

(Author's Note: I will be on Declan Finn's podcast The Catholic Geek on Sunday April 2 from 7 PM till 9 PM. You can look for my review of Love at First Bite, the sequel to Demons are Forever at about 9:05 PM that night. So tune in, or log on or whatever it is you do with podcasts and it'll be an awesome time.

Also, for the record, this is the second book in the series. I did review the first one.)

Way back, in the Late Pleistocene Era,  I went to high school with a guy named Brandon, but we all called him Monk. I still do. Monk is now married to the greatest sister in law of the heart EV-AR Melissa and has three young boys who I miss dearly since my move back home to Michigan. He has since cured himself of the malady I am about to discuss. His timing was epic.

I know it's weird, and most of you won't get this, but I can't help think of him while reading Declan Finn's Demons are Forever  because the main character, Marco Catalano, is a lot like Monk was in high school: He knows an awesome girl. He loves the awesome girl. He hangs out with the awesome girl. He just can't work up the gumption to tell the awesome girl how awesome she is and that he wants to be her man. Back in high school, and into my early twenties, I called this maneuver "Pulling a Monk." Marco appears to be a natural. And he's Catholic too. I wonder if he needs a nickname...

The thing about Marco is he's kind of like a Monk crossed with a Chuck Norris and a little bit of Buffy thrown in. Yeah, he's a physical bad ass but he's scared of a woman. Marco kills vampires in hand to hand combat using skill, brains and luck, along with the occasional assist from his friends and comrades. Monk, uhh...played football and baseball, but vampires? Not so much. At any rate...

I really like Marco as a character. Like, I want to hang out with the guy sometime. I know he doesn't exist, but Finn does a good enough job with the character that it's like being in the same room with a real person. Catalano has enough foibles to make him believable and enough confidence to make him worth reading. He's a really good guy with a really dark streak that he's not really comfortable with. I don't blame him. He fights for what's good and right but sometimes he has to kill vampires. He sees them as people and he struggles with it.

Marco's I-wish-she-was-my-girlfriend is named Amanda. She's a vampire, but this is where Finn turns vampirism on its head.  Amanda is a good vampire and a good Christian. She is a bloodsucker, it's true, but she is neither evil nor a sparkly emo whiner. Amanda is a hard-nosed, very intelligent and a good warrior in her own right. She faces down some men who give her problems because of her incredible good looks without breaking a sweat. She's just as gutless when it comes to talking to her I-wish-he-was-my-boyfriend but she's hardcore when it comes to everything else.

The book sizzles. The action sequences are impressive. Finn obviously spent hours mapping out the best way to do violence to vampires and other things before writing this. He has very carefully choreographed the fighting in this book. It's impressive. Marco and company are smart and dangerous. Catalano knows that he has to out-plan his enemies and he does so well. The action is so well described that I found myself moving in my seat along with the movements in the fighting. It was exciting. I had my adrenaline going. I wanted to kick ass along with him. It's probably better that I didn't though. I'm a three hundred pound man. I would have gotten in the way.

Something I've often commented on is the need for an epic villain. Finn delivers. Given the fact that the characters in the book can't figure out what Mr. Day is, I won't spoil the fun. But he is pure, unadulterated evil for a reason. He is deadly and vicious. He has a very interesting back story. He's the kind of guy that REALLY REALLY REALLY deserves every terrible thing that happens to him. He's tough as hell and smart. This is no Cobra Commander making stupid mistakes. Day is smart and savvy. He makes chaos because that is his nature. He is cocky but he's damn near indestructible so he should be. But Day does what he does in a logical manner. I wouldn't want to take this guy on.

Finn is a man of both religious and political conviction and it comes through in his writing. Marco, though a New York native, ends up in San Francisco. He is less than impressed with some of the antics of his neighbors. It's obvious that his beliefs belong not just to him but to Finn as well. I was okay with it because I share most of the same beliefs but if you find yourself on the more liberal and/or non-Christian end of the spectrum you may find some of the book to be a bit grating. Rest assured it's no worse than what us rightists feel when we're reading works by Scalzi, but  you guys aren't as used to it. Buck up though. The story is worth it.

I do have one gripe: One of the side characters, whose name I have refused to remember, is stumb as a dump yet she manages to kill vampires. She is, in terms of intelligence at least, the antithesis of the rest of the team. She should be dead but she's not. I don't get this character. She shouldn't be here. She's a bit too obvious. I'm kind of hoping that she's a mole somehow. She's a little too out there stupid. It makes sense if she is playing stupid as a form of camouflage but that's the only way it makes sense. She shouldn't be able to work her way through a brawl without screwing up. It threw me a few times. This chick is just terrible. Then again, it's not a world ending error and I really did like the rest of the book.

Bottom Line: 4.5 out of 5 Test Tubes Full of Holy Water

Demons are Forever
Declan Finn
Three Ravens Publishing, 2023


Demons are Forever is available for purchase at the link below. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

Declan Finn's Honor at Stake

Something I've always enjoyed is a new take on an old trope. Vampires have been around forever. Seriously, think about it. I personally have read everything from Bram Stoker's Dracula to P.N. Elrod's I, Strand: The Memoirs of a Vampire to about the first hundred and forty or so pages of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. Anne Rice and her Vampire Chronicles will always have a place in my heart. I've literally read and watched so many vampire stories that I can't remember them all. I have never seen vampires done quite like Declan Finn did his in Honor at Stake. His take is new and refreshing and I loved it. The story itself was both entertaining and action packed, but vampire lore as interpreted through Catholic philosophy a la Thomas Aquinas is both new and interesting. The fact that he seems to have added a scientific explanation for the existence of vampires was a lot of fun as well. The nerd in me approves of this for the simple fact that I like to know everything and Finn offers me the answer to one of Fantasy's oldest questions.

Finn is the proprietor of a blog known as A Pius Man and is also a member of The Catholic Geeks so it's hardly surprising to see him take a Catholic point of view on anything. Still, his Catholic background clearly provides him with the background needed to fit his theory of vampirism into his own strange theology. I admit to not being as familiar with the philosophy of Aquinas as Mr Finn but he makes it work even to a relative neophyte such as myself. He also made me a bit bitter toward my Intro to Western Philosophy professor but it's not Finn's fault that my prof skipped from Aristotle all the way to Friedrich Nietzsche. Still, Finn got his point through to me and I had no familiarity. He explains enough to get his point across without coming to a full stop and delivering a lecture.

Finn is also obviously and old-school roleplayer. No, I'm not referring to someone who plays Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games like Everquest or World of Warcraft, both of which I have enjoyed, but someone who has played pen and paper RPGs. I'm not sure which ones but one of his characters flat out states that alignment has an effect on the powers and limitations of his vampires. He actually phrases it better but I can't remember the exact quote and I'm too lazy to look it up. I got a kick out of it. I've played Dungeons and Dragons and just about every Palladium RPG published in or before the mid 90s. I don't want to think about how many I've read through and never gotten a chance to play. I got a kick out of it. It's not a major part of the story, it's more of a throw away line, but it made my day. If you've played you'll love it. If not, it's like one paragraph out of the story and you probably won't even notice it. Either way, I couldn't NOT mention it.

The plot of the book combines a mystery with a Blade style battle against vampires with a government agent that knows about the supernatural and fights it just like in everybody paranoiac's fantasy about conspiracies. Oh, and let's not forget about the Vatican's special forces unit. Just like the old Prego commercial, "It's in there!" There is a surprise around every corner and one or two other factions that I've intentionally left out. The crazy part is that the conspiracy isn't even led by the government. Trying to figure out how it all goes together is just part of the fun.

Finn's characters are both deep and flawed and that makes them entertaining. Two of them fall in love and won't admit it. One of them is truly a sadist and wants to hide it. Others have a weird sense of humor. His villains are truly villainous. There is always a sense that worse is about to happen and it usually does. Not all is revealed and even when things are revealed they open up more questions. I'm still trying to figure something out and it's bugging me. It seems to me that there has to be at least one more book coming and this has the feeling of an ongoing series that never ends.

As much as I enjoyed the characters in Honor at Stake there is one who I can't stand: Cliff Hanger makes an appearance. Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the book and I'm glad to know that there are more coming but after all the freshness and goodness of this story Finn hit us with the most overdone cliche in the history of history. Cliff hangers drive me up a wall. Having said that much, I'm still looking forward to the next installment. I just hope it gets here soon after he dropped that on all of us.

My only other complaint is that the cast may be a little too big at times. This seems to be the beginning of a series so I guess it's to be expected but it's not always easy to remember who is who. I really felt like I needed a scorecard at certain points. It's a manageable problem and seems to be something that will work itself out over time as we have more story to get used to the characters. I still loved the book.

Bottom Line: 4.75 out of 5 fangs

Honor at Stake
Declan Finn
Eternal Press, 2015


Honor at Stake is available for purchase at the link below. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

Liane Miller's Artifice

(Just a bit of housekeeping. Apparently, when an author sends you a .pdf with their cover that means you're supposed to use it in your review. Oops. Thank you to Lianne Miller for pointing that out. If you're an author who I reviewed before this and would like to see a .pdf of your cover on your review, please send me one and I'll update your review.)

 

Can someone please call Stephanie Meyer and tell her to read a book? It is a book in which a young girl is caught in between a vampire and a werewolf. It is a book about a girl whose life is quite frankly jacked up. It is a story about a girl, in this case named Eliza, has decisions to make that aren't always easy. It's a book about a girl who faces challenges by looking them straight in the face without flinching or turning into a whiny little bitch. In short, Lianne Millers Artifice  is a book about a character in some ways similar to Bella from Twilight and it DOESN'T SUCK. I think Ms. Meyers could learn a bit about characterization and keeping an audience that doesn't consist solely of teenage girls entertained by reading this. Really, all Artifice is missing when compared to the Twilight Saga is millions of dollars worth of marketing. I mean that. Err, well maybe that and three sequels. But there was a preview of a sequel to Artifice in the back of this book, so Miller is catching up. And it's not like I got much out of the sequels anyway, since I gave up on the Meyer written drek after one hundred and forty pages. I hear my then twelve year old niece enjoyed it though.

Artifice is about a girl named Eliza Ross. At the beginning of the book, she doesn't really have much of a memory or much of a life. She is a young college student who no one will talk to. She goes to class and back to her apartment. She regularly calls the police about a stalker that the can't find any sign of. About the time she gets locked into a psychiatric hospital, things start to get interesting. When her medical tests all come up weird and they decide that she is imagining her stalker things go off the rails and that's where the story really begins to heat up.

Before I get too far into the story, I want to point something out about the cover. It's beautiful but it's also a bit misleading. I spent five seconds looking at the picture and decided this was a paranormal romance. The story has elements of both the paranormal and romance genres present, but it is not by any means an actual paranormal romance. It has other elements that are just as prevalent and doesn't follow the typical romance formula that I've seen too many times in other places.

Artifice mixes genres quite effectively. We've got a bit of the paranormal and romance genres as mentioned above but there is also a good deal of mystery mixed in. Eliza doesn't know who or what she is. She has no idea how old she is or where she came from originally.  There are others in the book who do and we are clued in early but in many ways we don't know much more than she does. The end of the book leaves Eliza and the reader both still wondering about her personal history. Hints about but much is left to the imagination. I find I like it that way as the mystery helps pull us along in the story and helps build interest in other aspects of the story.

 Miller manages to do something few other authors have attempted and even fewer have pulled off, at least without multiple books to do it in. The books early villains are Eliza's allies at the end. Her most hated antagonist ends up being someone very important to her. It's a slow process to be sure, but Miller makes us want to like them and she manages to get us to do it. If it takes a Big Bad to make it happen then so be it. This is fantasy fiction and all great fantasy fiction has a great villain who is equal in skill and cunning to the heroes. Shashenka is not only that, but he also has access to more resources than our heroes and it shows. As the master of several covens of vampires he has greater numbers on his side as well. He's not the largest of the cast physically but he is far more powerful than mere size would indicate.

Eliza herself is impressive. This is a woman who doesn't have it all. She lacks in knowledge of self and, when we first meet her, is far from rich. She has a stalker and ends up in ever worsening situations. The bottom line, though, is that Eliza never gives up. She doesn't look to everyone else to fix her problems for her. In a situation where she could curl up into a ball and give up and feel sorry for herself but she doesn't. She fights and fights hard. I found myself liking this girl early in the book and liked her even more by the end. I may not agree with everything she does but I understand why she does and why she must. Her ability to fight is mentioned (and at one point she achieves the ultimate in modern-day bad-ass appearance by wielding a katana) but it's not shown much. Her willingness to sacrifice herself to protect her friends is impressive as well.

I really only have one complaint about the book and I hesitate to mention it but I feel like I have to. I try to keep my comments strictly about character and story and not so much to stylistic type things. The authors are review are published and I'm not (except as a blog writer I guess) and I tend to leave that end of things alone because I take it for granted that they can do it well or I would never have heard of them. This book has one stylistic thing that drove me up a wall until I got used to it and it will probably push some potential readers away, so I have to mention it in respect to fairness.

Artifice is written in the present tense. I found that hard to deal with at first. I got used to it after about two hundred pages but at first I found myself rewriting passages in my head to put them into past tense because that's what I'm used to. Once I got used to it I really enjoyed the book but it did cause some cognitive dissonance at first. Honestly, I'm not really sure if I got used to it or if I just got so wrapped up in the story that I forgot about redoing parts of it, but either way the story overrode the style for me. I know that things won't work that way for everyone though.

Bottom Line: 4.25 out of 5 fangs. It would definitely be higher if not for the present tense issue.

Artifice
Lianna Miller
Self published, 2015

Artifice is available for purchase at the following link: