I read Patricia Rosemoor and Marc Paoletti’s ‘The Last Vampire’, back in June, and felt that although it didn’t really bring anything new to the ‘urban fantasy table’ it was still an entertaining and fun read that was a good way to while away time on the daily commute to and from work. Their latest instalment, ‘The Vampire Agent’, is another book that has been sat on the ‘to read’ pile for a while but was promoted to ‘commuter read’ as it was a nice short read that didn’t look that it would require too much effort to get into. As it turned out, ‘The Vampire Agent’ did take some getting into...
‘The Vampire Agent’ kicks off a matter of days after the events of ‘The Last Vampire’ come to a close. Captain Scott Boulder and Leah Maguire are still in New Orleans, searching for the Philosopher’s Stone, but other matters are about to demand their immediate attention. A Department of Defense experiment has gone wrong and the traumatized (and genetically altered) subjects have escaped. Amongst them is Rachel Ackart, dangerous enough by herself but even more dangerous now she is under the influence of a malign spirit that Scott and Leah thought they had dealt with.
The race is on to track Ackart down before a plot, that even she is unaware of, can come to fruition...
‘The Vampire Agent’ operates along the same lines as it’s predecessor, a mixture of action and the complicated stuff that always seems to happen when two leading characters are in love but have good reasons for not wanting to take things any further (although they usually manage to...) We’re allowed to see a little bit more of what’s going on in Scott and Leah’s minds in a move that’s clearly designed to show character development and set things up for a third book in the series (the plot does this as well with things arising, at the end, that need resolving urgently). The problem I found was that while this approach does flesh the characters out (not just the main ones either) it also had the effect of slowing things right down to a crawl which annoyed the hell out of me. Scott loves Leah but is afraid his vampire nature will prove too strong to resist, Leah loves Scott but can’t stand his attitude (and she’s got issues as well...), Rachel loves someone who died in World War Two and can’t stop thinking about him... There is a lot of this thoughtful meandering in the book and it gets overly repetitive very quickly. We know that various characters have issues but the point of the plot was something else entirely as far as I could see. Slowing things down, and concentrating on something that didn’t advance the main plot an awful lot, didn’t help the story flow. Quite the opposite in fact... And I’m not even going to go into the endless dilemmas that Leah has every time she has to use her magic...
To be fair though, if this is shaping up to be a series then getting into character’s heads now could pay dividends in the long term, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how things pan out.
The issue with pacing is a real shame because when things actually get going ‘The Vampire Agent’ becomes an exciting read with plenty happening. Rosemoor and Paoletti are good at building up the tension (for example, Leah’s journey through an installation teeming with vampires) and then finishing things with an explosive payoff. However, while these passages were fun to get into I was left feeling a bit cheated by the book as a whole. If things had been tightened up then the whole book could have been like this...
‘The Vampire Agent’ is one of those infuriating reads where glimpses of potential hooked me but the rest of the book dragged along really slowly. If you like excessive angst in your urban fantasy then ‘The Vampire Agent’ may be one for you but it wasn’t for me...
Five and Three Quarters out of Ten
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