I promised that I would try another Mario Acevedo book, since HarperCollins was kind enough to offer them at a conference. This was milder than Jailbait Zombie, but not compelling enough to make me want to read the others in the series.
"Felix Gomez went to Iraq a soldier. He came back a vampire." Now he's a private detective, visiting Denver to investigate a nymphomania outbreak at a Department of Energy nuclear facility. Women are trying to bed him and men are trying to kill him. Government work is not as quiet as it is made out to be.
It is workmanlike. It is fine. If you like this kind of thing, it is a fair example. It will never be on anyone's must-read list, but it delivers on its premise with average quality. I have yet to read anything from James Patterson, but I am led to believe that this is comparable (probably slightly below, since Mr. Patterson is leading his bracket).
"This kind of thing" here means salacious hard-boiled vampire detective fiction. (I feel like I should have some commas in there, but it is more a concatenation of genres than a list of adjectives.) Middlingly salacious, very hard-boiled, constantly vampire, not terribly detective; the "hard-boiled" overwhelms the "detective."
Despite the title, this is less salacious than Jailbait Zombie. Women shuck clothes fairly frequently, but the violent scenes are more likely to be completed than the sex scenes. Men shuck clothing at least as frequently, particularly but not only Felix. There is a surprisingly high homoerotic quotient, with at least three men and five women offering Felix sex. Well, two of the men leap directly to kissing rather than making a verbal offer, and one of the women does not so much "offer" as "demand at gunpoint."
This book was nicely spoiled by Jailbait Zombie, so reading them in order could be helpful. On the other hand, the plot twists are (respectively) telegraphed, way out there, and mostly unexplained, you can get through almost the entire book before it becomes relevant. The plot is sufficiently coherent, at least as much as any action film, with the same technique of keeping things moving rather than pausing to think about it all. The climaxes are anti-climactic, going with late-game info dumps that take up more time than the associated fight scenes.
The book is not especially smart. (I hit similar points on Jailbait Zombie.) "Vampire" is used as an adjective to hand-wave any exposition of "vampire hypnosis," "vampire senses," "vampire enzymes," "vampire levitation powers," etc. (It is nice to see someone not trying to redefine what a vampire is (beyond letting makeup block sunlight), although there are enough vampire myths that giving someone "standard" vampire powers still makes some abilities seem random.) Plot points are inexplicable or over-explained. There is gratuitous Latin, with the same terms re-defined multiple times in case you forgot. The book seems to assume that the reader is not especially smart, repeatedly summarizing events in case you missed them, and since more or less the same thing happens three times in a row early in the book, you really had to miss them.
This repetition worries me about the continuing series. It is common for the later books in the series to summarize earlier events, for late arrivals or anyone who has forgotten in the years between publication. Jailbait Zombie mentions events from this book several times, not just in case you missed the book, but in case you missed the earlier repetition. This book refreshes your memory several times. I fear the series' becoming a recursive summarization by the time it gets to 8 or 10 volumes, unless it adds a lot of pages. And books that don't think you are smart do not want to threaten you with lots of pages.
That page count is higher than the word count might demand. Where long books try to look slimmer by cramming the pages with small fonts and narrow margins, Nymphos takes the children's book approach with a generous font with plenty of negative space. One way to make it a page-turner: put less on each page so you turn them more quickly.
I met Mario Acevedo. He explained to someone, "This is not great literature." It is meant to be a rollicking romp. If you like this kind of thing, and are not some kind of intellectual snob, you could very well enjoy it. But you probably have a long list of "must reads" before you get to it.
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