Claire has a job to do. She’s at a music industry conference for a few
short days where she can try and get as much PR business for her boss as
possible. Thankfully, she’s very very good at what she does. Even with the
distraction of her husband ringing constantly with hi passive aggressive
attacks and their failing marriage.
But there’s a major distraction – Bette. Beautiful,
seductive Bette who scents out Claire's untapped supernatural potential and introduces Claire to a whole new set of experiences.
Not least of which is vampirism. And her Bisexuality. It’s
a steep learning curve for Claire which only becomes more complicated as
vampire politics raises its head.
Claire is a character with a lot of depth and development
– far beyond the vampirism of the story. She has a family, a rocky marriage, a
complicated PR job, she schmoozes clients and develops ad campaigns, she builds
some friendships – there’s a lot going on with Claire even before we consider
the vampire angle
Her relationship break up with her husband was probably
the most covered storyline. We see the foundation of it and how it progressed
towards break up. It felt very real with a lot of substance to it. Similarly,
the work she is doing promoting the one company she met at the conference was
also quite detailed with a lot of information, character interaction and relationship.
But both of these – the most developed storylines – are background stories,
incidental to the dominant plot. They add flesh to the character but I don’t
expect them to lead the book.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked these storylines. As I said,
her relationship drama with her husband has real depth and realness. And her
flirting, fun, bantering work in her job is extremely amusing to follow and
either could be a non-supernatural story in their own right, I think. I enjoyed
them, they were interesting and I’d probably be happy to read them even without
the vampire element (and I never read non-speculative fiction).
