Al Hamblyn is a lawyer on the edge of complete failure
until he gets the strangest case of his career
A man has been arrested for a series of attacks. Attacks
in which he drunk blood
He is representing a vampire on trial – and trying to
prove this revelation not guilty in the middle of a media storm.
This book brings us a court case with a vampire accused
of assault and drinking blood
That alone is an excellent twist as we see the whole
concept of vampirism and drinking blood actually being out on trial
It also brings us a really fascinating concept of
vampires – as a separate species evolving alongside humanity and slowly being
wiped out by humanity’s numbers. Not because of hatred, or persecution or
murder (except way back in out history where, thought provokingly, it points
out that the lack of other subspecies in the homo genus does suggest that ye
old homo sapiens did not adapt well to competition) but through simple
environmental devastation. It’s a very original concept
The problem is that I find myself being distracted or
becoming disinterested in a lot of this book. Many times I kept questioning why
I was being given various pieces of information – almost from the very
beginning this book introduces me to Al Hamblyn, the main character and Dragul’s
lawyer and we get a mini biography of him. Or a not so mini biography. And it’s
not bad or even badly written – but who is this guy and why do I care so much about
his life? This happens several times in the book, we get more snippets of Al’s
life and I’m just not really sure why I know
And it’s not like Al is a bad character. He isn’t – far from it. He’s intelligent, driven, far from perfect, with good flaws even though he tries. He has some great friends and some great people in his life who really make up a really fun legal team. This is not a bad thing even by close – it’s not a bad story I just don’t really know why I’m reading it
In some ways it feels like Dragul is almost tangential to
the story
There’s also a surprisingly smooth pathway. Everything
just seems to go so well. The court case, their life after the court case. It
also does the annoying thing of introducing the middle of the book as a
prologue so the court case fails any attempt at tension because we already know
the result of it. I find myself fighting not to skim this book simply because I
know exactly what is going to happen for so long.
