Hello everyone!
Yep, it's that annoying time when I advertise the heck out of this site haha!
BookSirens, if you don't yet know, is an online community for book lovers and writers alike where you can find TONS of great reads for free, sign up to get the ARCs, and then read them by a due date that's generated by the site.
The only thing you need to do is leave a review after you've finished.
I mean, can it get any better than that?!?
Nope.
I tend to have one or two in the works all the time from there because the choices are excellent, and this month's really wasn't an exception either.
Kiss Me Deadly grabbed hold of me with the first sentence and didn't let go.
I am CONFIDENT I have nothing at all like what this book is about in my arsenal so sadly there won't be any links down below for you to check out, but I'm absolutely going to be reading the second book once it releases because, well, reasons.
For the time being, then, Jessie Thomas' Kiss Me Deadly is a one-and-done kind of deal!
So let's begin.
Sera, or Seraphina for the longer version of her name even though she prefers Sera, is a necromancer - aka she does death magic, resurrecting dead people, communicating with spirits, that sort of thing. If you think that's creepy, you should look at the other side of the job coin in which she sends aggravated ghosts and poltergeists to the other side so regular mortals can have some peace and quiet.
That's actually how our story begins - with her ME friend calling her that there's a ghost in his morgue throwing buckets around and attacking him.
Sera comes to deal with it, gets thrown around a little - because, rip-shit pissed ghost - and then leaves to her actual paying job which is to resurrect a dead student.
The groundskeeper is an old friend of hers, and he lets her into the cemetery without problem so she can go and dig up the grave she needs, but of course she gets interrupted AGAIN, this time by a vampire who wants to enlist her help in finding his son. Now, as vampires can't actually reproduce, this means his undead son, and Sera would have sent him all the way to hell if there wasn't a gunshot in that moment, and she had to rush off to double check if her friend was okay.
Newsflash: he ain't. He got shot to death.
She reverses the process quickly but also makes a gruesome discovery of a body all ritualistically prepared for a funeral. It's a body of a feral - or rogue vampire, in that whoever created said feral didn't bother to teach it anything so it was like a wild animal.
Sending the vampire on his way, Sera is more concerned about this all than she wants to admit, so she goes to meet with her ex Dev, vampire hunter extraordinaire, who works for the rich vamps of the city to keep the ferals and other loose cannons under control.
She's also the person who used to work with Sera on the hunting business, until Sera figured necromancy was her better shot and went off to do her own thing. But she needs her for information and help both, because Dev reveals there's been more than one ritualistic feral death, which means something wicked this way comes.
No, literally.
Things get more complicated when Sera accepts Nathaniel's job of looking for his son, though they can't reach him through the spirit world so initially they think vampires have no souls once they pass, but our resident necromancer's unconvinced. There's something more going on here, and she knows it, even with all the distractions.
Like saving Nathaniel's life when she realizes he's letting himself die because he thinks he failed Teddy, so she drags him to a blood bank to get fed.
Or that she did indeed successfully resurrect the poor guy she was initially sent to dig up, and he calls her a while after saying he remembers who killed him. It turns out to be a weird Stepford wives kind of person, Melanie, who runs a cupcake shop - and apparently inducts unsuspecting students into her cult through free wi-fi and edible confetti.
Sera and Dev follow the cult to the central train terminal which is infested with ferals, where they witness the idiots actually rope one of them to drag off, but of course things go haywire because Dev sends her knives into one of the cultists, the ferals go for said cultist, then they're on the hunt for fresher meat and go after Dev and Sera. Which may have been the end of Sera if not for the fact she messages Nathaniel right before going in and the vampire shows up to rip the ferals a new one as he rescues her.
Regrouping, they then decide they need a different tactic - aka Sera's going to have to pretend she wants to get inducted into this cult so they can take them down from within, much to her chagrin and displeasure, but Melanie totally buys what she's selling and invites her along to their little meeting where it's revealed they're the ones who're ritualistically killing the ferals for their venom.
Because, per Melanie (a feral attack survivor herself), the venom from their fangs will cure anything and give eternal youth. That's why they ingest it, something that isn't meant to be done because that can kill them if the dosage is wrong.
Which naturally means Sera has to have a dose and nearly dies of an OD, but Dev drags her out of there and takes her to Nathaniel's place to recover - and Sera explains to him that the cult has Teddy, his son.
Yep, in all the other nonsense, she had time to find out where the boy's being kept, and also had a couple of visions of his previous, human life. Nathaniel is now totally on board with taking the entire thing down, so Sera agrees to an initiation process during which she gets to kill a feral herself (pretending she's never done it before, of course), while the rest of them head into the main house to liberate Teddy.
Things go a bit haywire by the time Sera and the rest of them return to the compound, at which point a battle ensues, Nathaniel gets shot but is saved by a moleskin notebook he carries in his breast pocket, he throws Melanie down into the ferals chamber she has underneath her greenhouse, but Teddy's stuck down there as well and they're too late, because by the time Sera launches herself below, disregarding her own safety, Teddy's already been speared through when he was pushed against a spike in the wall.
Why did Sera jump down there, you may ask? Well, she and Nathaniel have kind of been dancing around each other for about a third of the book and their relationship, while new, means a lot to her, so naturally his son does, too.
They wrap up loose ends and take Teddy back to the family mansion where Sera performs another resurrection ritual, though this time it has unexpected consequences - she brings Teddy back, alright, but she brings him back HUMAN, not vampire!
WUT.
Nathaniel - or Nate, as he now insists on being called - is overjoyed though, especially given his own macabre family history during which his parents literally left him behind after he was turned, and he doesn't really know how to repay the flame-haired girl he's fallen for.
Other than paying her an absurd amount of money which she rolls her eyes at, because, men.
MEN.
Throughout the book there's a subplot with Ellie, Sera's sister, who we don't really know much about until it's revealed more or less at the end, that she was killed by a vampire and was Sera's first resurrection and the reason she eventually turned away from hunting to necromancy again. She also hasn't been entirely herself ever since, so the sisters have slowly been rebuilding their relationship (even going so far as to return to the family home which they left after their parents just couldn't deal with the necromancy and Ellie's resurrection, so the two leave the poltergeist the two obnoxious idiots want dealt with right where it is).
This sort of goes down the drain when the boarding house ghost - who seems to genuinely like Ellie but is a royal pain to Sera - reveals to Ellie that Sera's fallen in love with a vampire, which causes the girl to move into a different room and throw an epic temper tantrum.
So at this point, the love story is progressing nicely, the friendships are alright, but the sisterhood is basically in tatters, and I'm over here HOPING that there won't be a breakup in book two because that would break my heart. Yes, I am aware of the pun. LOL.
Kiss Me Deadly got me on the simple premise that I'd never read about a necromancer before - which I suppose will be shocking to some people, but somehow I just never got around to it.
The cover looked promising, the blurb sounded MORE promising, and I've sort of been itching for a new vampire thing to look into lately as well, so I figured, why not?
The story of the book really delivers, in my opinion: you have Sera, the necromancer, who gets tangled up in something so much bigger than just bringing people back from the dead with her powers, because she first gets hired to resurrect a dead son for a wealthy couple, then she gets contracted by a vampire to find HIS son - and it turns out it's all connected. But there's also the fact that vampires and necromancers don't really get along - well, it looks to me like nobody in this book really gets along, from different groups and species that is, except over the fact that the feral need to be put down as efficiently as possible.
So Sera gets herself tangled in business that she really shouldn't have, and in the process gets walloped by a pan in the morgue which is handled by a pissed off ghost, gets bitten by a feral, ingests vampire venom, and somehow manages to fall in love with Nate, the vampire who's son she's searching for.
I mean, what else can happen in this stuff? Oh, lots more, trust me. TRUST ME.
I liked Sera immediately for her sass and complete disregard for any propriety whatsoever, she just calls BS and says it like it is, and I applaud her for it. I loved where she and her sister Ellie live in the boarding house, I loved the fact that their relationship was obviously fractured but building back up because of past trauma, and then of course the other supporting characters were also phenomenal, from Devyn, the ex who is also a vampire hunter, to Rhys, the pathologist who somehow shrieks loudly into the phone when things start bouncing around his morgue because of ghosts. Everyone else just adds different flavours to the book, including Ms Cupcake (see what I did there, cupcakes and flavours).
I really enjoyed the mystery aspect, though I will say that it shows none of these characters are detectives because I asked a pertinent question right at the start of the book (did these dead ferals start showing up at about the same time Sera's resurrected dude died?), and my theory was later proven correct, but that's half the fun I guess! It was a very nice progression and the reveals were nicely paced, in my opinion.
The one thing that I have to dock a star off for is that past and present tense in sentences were interchangeable a lot, which was a bit jarring because if a sentence talks about one subject, it can't really go from present to past that quickly. I noticed a couple other grammatical errors but none were glaring. Also, while I enjoyed the romance aspect of the book, I do feel it was perhaps just a smidge rushed - I'd have liked some more sprinklings of it earlier on, from Nate's side, just so it didn't feel all that abrupt, though again, I DID enjoy it.
And now please, PLEASE to the author of this book: I know this is meant to be a trilogy. Or at least a series. Please, PLEASE don't have them break up in the second book. PLEASE. I've seen too much of that in romances already. Have them instead be a committed couple who's going to face the troubles and trials before them together and come out stronger, without one or the other walking away for some inane reason or other! THAT would be a surprise and a half and so much pleasanter to read about. It's not about storming off in a relationship, it's about finding ways to communicate and construct a bridge over a divide, and I feel like that part is lacking in literature nowadays. I'd be SO happy to see it in this story!
Overall though, recommend!
The cover looked promising, the blurb sounded MORE promising, and I've sort of been itching for a new vampire thing to look into lately as well, so I figured, why not?
The story of the book really delivers, in my opinion: you have Sera, the necromancer, who gets tangled up in something so much bigger than just bringing people back from the dead with her powers, because she first gets hired to resurrect a dead son for a wealthy couple, then she gets contracted by a vampire to find HIS son - and it turns out it's all connected. But there's also the fact that vampires and necromancers don't really get along - well, it looks to me like nobody in this book really gets along, from different groups and species that is, except over the fact that the feral need to be put down as efficiently as possible.
So Sera gets herself tangled in business that she really shouldn't have, and in the process gets walloped by a pan in the morgue which is handled by a pissed off ghost, gets bitten by a feral, ingests vampire venom, and somehow manages to fall in love with Nate, the vampire who's son she's searching for.
I mean, what else can happen in this stuff? Oh, lots more, trust me. TRUST ME.
I liked Sera immediately for her sass and complete disregard for any propriety whatsoever, she just calls BS and says it like it is, and I applaud her for it. I loved where she and her sister Ellie live in the boarding house, I loved the fact that their relationship was obviously fractured but building back up because of past trauma, and then of course the other supporting characters were also phenomenal, from Devyn, the ex who is also a vampire hunter, to Rhys, the pathologist who somehow shrieks loudly into the phone when things start bouncing around his morgue because of ghosts. Everyone else just adds different flavours to the book, including Ms Cupcake (see what I did there, cupcakes and flavours).
I really enjoyed the mystery aspect, though I will say that it shows none of these characters are detectives because I asked a pertinent question right at the start of the book (did these dead ferals start showing up at about the same time Sera's resurrected dude died?), and my theory was later proven correct, but that's half the fun I guess! It was a very nice progression and the reveals were nicely paced, in my opinion.
The one thing that I have to dock a star off for is that past and present tense in sentences were interchangeable a lot, which was a bit jarring because if a sentence talks about one subject, it can't really go from present to past that quickly. I noticed a couple other grammatical errors but none were glaring. Also, while I enjoyed the romance aspect of the book, I do feel it was perhaps just a smidge rushed - I'd have liked some more sprinklings of it earlier on, from Nate's side, just so it didn't feel all that abrupt, though again, I DID enjoy it.
And now please, PLEASE to the author of this book: I know this is meant to be a trilogy. Or at least a series. Please, PLEASE don't have them break up in the second book. PLEASE. I've seen too much of that in romances already. Have them instead be a committed couple who's going to face the troubles and trials before them together and come out stronger, without one or the other walking away for some inane reason or other! THAT would be a surprise and a half and so much pleasanter to read about. It's not about storming off in a relationship, it's about finding ways to communicate and construct a bridge over a divide, and I feel like that part is lacking in literature nowadays. I'd be SO happy to see it in this story!
Overall though, recommend!
xx
*image not mine
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