I grabbed a copy Blood of the Beast, by Tamela Quijas from the Amazon freebie list.
Description from Goodreads:
There is a scent that fills the night, far more delicate than the beat of the heart, more fragile than the whisper of breath escaping human lungs.
The echo that fills the darkness is the scent of blood pulsating through the mortal body.
Commonly overlooked by those among the living, it is a sound fervently sought by those residing on the fringes of the world existing between the living and the undead.
Blood is what the beast craves.
Detective Valentina Kureyev had been assigned to one of the worst murder cases of the century. A serial killer haunted the streets of her city, depositing bloodless corpses throughout the section of town known as Little Europe.
She hadn’t a clue to the identity of the culprit.
The case was hopeless.
The terror was real.
As real as Demetri Daskova.
The Professor of Russian Antiquities had been targeted with the murderer’s special form of a calling card. Val couldn’t turn away from his offer of aide in the bizarre case, even though he whispered tales of ‘those that walked on the dark side of the moon’ and the beast that hungrily fed on human blood.
He was the primary suspect.
Review:
Good lord that was just horrible. I almost didn’t even make it through the prologue. But it’s the end of the year and I’d set myself an alphabet soup challenge (read a book by an author for every letter of the alphabet) and I only have Q, X,Y & Z left and I DNFed my Y yesterday. So, I wasn’t going to do the same with my Q. So I was trapped with it.
Eventually I just started reading passages aloud to my husband, because sharing the shocking horridness and strange, STRANGE over-use of the word quiver/quivering was the only way I could keep going. (Seriously, the word is used a lot, often in questionable ways.) The whole book is painfully wordy. No one has gold eyes, they’re golden hued eyes, etc. It contradicts itself. It is painfully dependent on tropes. There is no palpable chemistry between the characters. The female MC is pathologically angry and extremely unlikable (but all the men lust after her). The male MC was a jerk in the beginning and we’re never shown that he changed. It’s just supposed to be assumed. In addition to too many words, there are also misused words, missing words and anachronistic language. The villain is a cliche scorned woman (who spent one purchased night with the man she goes bad over) and the whole thing was just jumpy and clunky. But hey, the author’s name is Quijas, so it’s all good.