Monthly Archives: March 2013

Mercy’s Debt

Book Review of Mercy’s Debt, by Sloan Archer

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Mercy's Debt

Yesterday I grabbed Sloan Archer‘s novel, Mercy’s Debt, off of the Amazon KDP list. Lately I’ve been really agonising over which book to read next, so when I accidentally tapped this one, opening it directly after it downloaded I decided to just roll with the punches and read it right then.

Description from Amazon:
After graduating from the prestigious Dewhurst University, Mercy Montgomery finds herself in a bit of financial trouble: over $108,000 worth of financial trouble, in fact. She can’t find a job to save her life, and with bill collectors constantly at her heels, she has no idea how she will ever come up with the money needed in order to keep her head above water.

Mercy’s monetary worries seem to be over after a chance meeting with mystifyingly pale Michael Graves, who offers her a high-paying job at his company, Dignitary. But there’s a catch; the seemingly harmless Dignitary is an underground organization that offers human chaperones to wealthy bloodsucking clients.

As if congregating with the undead doesn’t make life complicated enough for Mercy, there’s a savage killer on the loose who appears to have a craving for her blood. Soon Mercy is torn between a dark and dangerous underworld of supernatural desire and a simple life of practicality, and sexy but dangerous business magnate Robert Bramson is the man she blames for her confusion. As the killer closes in, Mercy realizes that she must make a decision. But will she make her choice too late?

Review:
Sloan Archer is one talented author. I’ll give her that. Her character’s are fresh, funny, and fleshed out, especially Mercy and her roommate Liz. Their banter is some of the best in the book. She understands humour and can time a joke brilliantly. Though I’ll admit the main sex scene felt a little choppy, it still had some smoulder to it, and I like the cover.

Mercy’s Debt starts out with something a lot of recent college grads can relate to, many student loans and few job prospects. I don’t know if the completely out-of-leftfield lesbian exploration passage was supposed to be something else recent grads could relate to, funny, or a red herring of some sort. I liked it well enough. It’s something you don’t see addressed in the genre often, but it seemed to serve no purpose in the book. In fact the book, in terms of the story, doesn’t even start until Mercy meets Michael and Robert. The background information in the first couple chapters helped solidify Mercy’s character, but seemed awful long for such a short novel.

Which brings me to my only MAJOR complaint, the shortness of the novel. This is something I seem to be harping on about a lot lately. Where is the rest of the book? I’d say it ends on a cliffhanger, but that requires an ending of some sort. Something has to wrap up and conclude. This is one of those books that just stops instead. You still don’t know who the murder is, what happened to Liz, if Mercy will fall in love or accept the love offered her, pays off her debts, or lives happily ever after or not. You know the characters names and some of their histories, that the setting is in California, there are vampires and someone is killing women, that’s is.

I laughed out loud a lot in this book. I liked the main and supporting cast. I routed for the fragile hero and witty heroine. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, right up until I hit the unexpected words ‘The End’ and got a little bit angry. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that there isn’t yet a second book to run out and buy, even if begrudgingly. I have no problem buying sequel to finish a series. It always irks me to buy sequels to finish a book and that’s what this feels like. I got a free teaser, but have to pay for the conclusion. This doesn’t leave me with feelings of happy contentment, even if I enjoyed the book up until that point.

Review of Buffy Chistopher’s Bound By Darkness

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Bound By DarknessI grabbed Buffy Christopher-Vincent’s Bound By Darkness off of the KDP free list. At the time of posting it appeared to still be free, there and on Smashwords.

Description from Goodreads:
Lila Anderson’s is having visions of murdered women in the back alleys of San Francisco through the eyes of a hero trying to save them. She’s supposed to be a dominatrix, not a psychic! This hero has a name. Drake Bennett. Drake leads a solitary life as a vampire and when Lila invades his mind he wants her out.

Then a known murderer kidnaps Lila, and uses her life experience in bondage and domination to break her and turn her against Drake. Will the deep feelings of desire she has for Drake and their psychic link be enough to save Lila before she succumbs to her dark desires?

Review:
I picked this book up solely because I thought it was interesting that the main character was a Dominatrix. I envisioned a strong, sexually dominant female who knows her own mind and body. I thought, ‘well, this could be fun.’ It wasn’t.

Lila was billed as a Dominatrix but in almost every sex scene she was playing a Submissive, getting off on her own rape essentially. (That’s Submissive with a capital S by the way.) I don’t mean to infer that  BDSM and Dom/Sub relationships are akin to rape, of course not. But in the first sex scene for example, Lila was shackled, gagged, blindfolded and whipped by a homicidal maniac that she was terrified of, knew had killed at least one woman THAT NIGHT, didn’t want to be in session with, but couldn’t escape, and had no reasonable expectation of survival. Then afterwards she cried because of the trauma. Rape. And she’s supposed to have orgasmed in the middle of all of that? Riiiggghhhttt. 

I very rarely don’t finish books, but I almost gave up at that point. I just wouldn’t have picked that book up to start with. That’s before I even get into whether I believe Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs would have allowed her to enjoy any aspect of the experience if she was so scared for her life. Maybe I’m just being naive about the life-style, but it seems unlikely that basic biology would allow the body to prfioritize sexual satisfaction over physical survival to start with, no matter how much you like pain, need release, or how you’ve been ‘trained’. Both fear and climax require hormones and, while no expert, I would expect those that produce fear to top those that lead to sexual enjoyment. It’s worth noting too, that in those scenes in which she isn’t a Submissive, she is never once a Dominant either. 

Having read the book I can now read between the lines of the description and see that the clues were there. I just didn’t see them, so I can’t completely fault Christopher-Vincent for my dislike of the subject matter. I chose to read the book. I apparently let myself focus on the character’s Dominatrix role as the primary focus of the description instead of the “life experience in bondage and domination to break her.” Yea, that’s the theme of the book. There is no female empowerment here. If you’re looking for it, go elsewhere. I kind of wish I had.

The basic writing in the book is fine. I didn’t notice very many editorial mishaps and, though I found it exceedingly repetitive, the plots moves along. Granted this is erotic fiction. There’s probably 70 pages of plot and 200 pages of sex, most of it questionably consensual (if not wholly non-consensual).

In the end I can’t completely trash the novel. I might not have liked it, and I didn’t. I had to force myself to finish it. I acknowledge that most of those things I disliked are of the personal opinion sort. I was uncomfortable with Lila’s constant role as a victim and her sexual satisfaction during extended scenes of abuse. These men were trying to hurt and break her. There were no safe words to use, no trust or understanding that the Sub was actually a power player in the game. She was a slave.  There was never any real explanation for why Lila started having visions of Drake to start with and I thought that the centuries old antagonist was dispatched far, far too easily. These opinions can’t reasonably be seen as a reflection of the book’s intrinsic value as a piece of literature though, erotic or otherwise. I did really like the host of side characters, especially Charlie and David, and Drake was a pure, kind soul that you couldn’t help but route for. 

The Ghost and the Graveyard

Book Review of Genevieve Jack’s The Ghost and the Graveyard

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The Ghost and the GraveyardI grabbed Genevieve Jack’s The Ghost and the Graveyard from the Amazon KDP list.

Description from Goodreads:
Left destitute by an unscrupulous ex-boyfriend, Grateful Knight takes her father up on his offer to live rent-free in a house he hasn’t been able to sell. Desperate to make a new start, Grateful tries to overlook the property’s less desirable features, like the graveyard that stretches to her back door. On the bright side, the unbelievably gorgeous cemetery caretaker, Rick, is dead set on helping her feel at home. She vows to take things slow, considering her recent disastrous relationship, but is baffled when she literally can’t keep her hands off of him.

When things in Grateful’s house start moving on their own another man enters her life, a sexy ghost with a dark secret. Magical forces are at work in the tiny town of Red Grove and they’re converging on Grateful. Solving this ghostly mystery won’t be easy and with the caretaker becoming increasingly jealous of her spectral relationship, Grateful may be forced to choose between the ghost and the graveyard.

Review:
I really quite enjoyed this book. That’s despite it being told in the first person present tense, which I generally hate and involving both a love triangle and insta-lust, which usually drive me crazy. The book somehow managed to overcome all of its handicaps and provide an enjoyable read. And it did it with surprising ease. The magic irritation-nullifying ingredient? Humour. The Ghost and the Graveyard is funny. Yes, yes it’s hot and steamy too, but that wouldn’t have been enough to overcome my dislike for the parts that make up its whole. I needed Grateful’s quick wit and sarcastic internal monologue for that. She’s a great heroine. She manages to stay strong and sure of her own sense of self in the face of some fairly severe identity shake-ups. She might have gone weak at the knees in the face of Rick and his awesome sex appeal, but she was never weak-willed. I respected that.

Rick was a surprisingly complex hero. He was simultaneously strong and fragile, loyal and of a little untrustworthy. I’m sure (in my own imaginings) that there will be a lot more to him and his backstory in the future books. I liked Lucas too. He was like a lost puppy, but I was a little tired of his whinging by the end of the book.

I was a disappointed that the book didn’t quite wrap up by the end. Don’t get me wrong it ended OK, but only one small part of the larger whole was solved. There were a lot of loose threads about. I’m always left wanting when that is the case. It’s a shame the next book isn’t out yet.