‘The Last Vampire’ – Patricia Rosemoor and Marc Paoletti (Del Rey)

After having read ‘The Company’ I fancied something that was a little lighter and easy going. A book where things actually happened but also a book that I could put down easily once I got to work. By one of those happy strokes of fate, ‘The Last Vampire’ had come through the door a couple of days ago and one look at the blurb told me that this was the book I should be reading…
First of all, ignore the cover. Actually; don’t ignore it, laugh your head off at the slightly romantic tone it is trying to project because (apart from the odd little bit here and there) this isn’t a romance at all.
See the rugged looking man holding the gun? He’s Captain Scott Boulder and he’s as hard as his name suggests. Boulder heads up a Black Ops team whose superhuman powers come from the DNA of a five hundred year old mummified vampire. The only problem is that the vampire has returned to life, butchered his team and escaped. The bad guy needs to be hunted down and Boulder is just the man for the job. He’s more than the man for the job but he doesn’t realise that just yet…
See the sultry looking redhead? That’s anthropologist Leah Maguire, not only has she had a run in with our bad guy vampire but she can do magic as well! Maguire is just the lady to help Boulder on this case (especially with the Voodoo priestess and her zombies) and she’s also just the kind of lady to fall in love with a hardened Black Ops soldier…
If you add some gunfights and a tiny bit of detective work then you have the plot in a nutshell. When I say ‘nutshell’ that’s precisely what I mean because not a lot else happens but to be fair, the authors do a great job at stretching this one out over three hundred pages with a liberal dose of gunfire and confrontation. It’s as cheesy as you like with tough men (who are all vulnerable inside) and vulnerable women who can rise to the occasion when needed. You’ve probably read this before, just with a different title in a different book but it still manages to be an entertaining read nevertheless. ‘The Last Vampire’ doesn’t claim to be anything other than it is and comes out the other end looking better for it. It’s basically James Bond with vampires and it also has a neat line in zombies (as a zombie fan this is great as far as I’m concerned). Like I said, the plot is minimal but things move so fast that I didn’t really care, especially when the zombies took on the marines…
The only thing that did bug (and it’s quite a big thing for me) was the way that the collaboration, between two authors, came across on the page. George RR Martin’s latest ‘Wild Cards’ collection was the work of nine authors and I was hard pressed to tell where one jumped in and another left. This wasn’t the case with ‘The Last Vampire’ which sometimes felt a little clunky when the authors ‘swapped shifts’. This was especially the case when a few pages of hardcore military action all of a sudden got… ‘sexy’. The change in tempo just didn’t work for me and I think the book could really have benefited from more work in this area.
A pretty big niggle to round things off with but still a great ‘commuter’ read or ‘beach book’. Worth a look if you fancy a fast paced, light read.

Seven and a Half out of Ten