Monday, June 23, 2008

The Last Vampire by Patricia Rosemoor & Marc Paoletti


The Last Vampire
Patricia Rosemoor & Marc Paoletti
Del Rey – Ballantine Books
June 24, 2008
ISBN# 978-0-345-50104-2

From the back cover:
Spawned of alchemy and blood, he was the last of a brutal, ancient line. Now he has just been reborn.
-
Deep in a Texas cave, the military unearths a five-hundred-year-old corpse, its desiccated flesh teeming with mysterious DNA that can transform mortals into beings of unimaginable power.
-
Captain Scott Boulder, leader of a Black Ops unit that has been endowed with these superhuman abilities, is among the first to benefit from the find. But when, with the help of a voodoo priestess, the creature is conjured to life, unleashing an ancient evil bent on reinstating its poisonous kind on earth, Scott knows he must return the monster to the grave. But this is no ordinary vampire. Once a brutal torturer in the Spanish Inquisition, it can bend the laws of science and magic in horrifying new ways.
-
Powerless to fight this evil alone, Scott grudgingly seeks the aid of reclusive anthropologist Leah Maguire, an expert in the mystical rituals of the past. To keep humanity from entering a new Dark Age, Scott and Leah will battle unspeakable horrors and will sacrifice everything they hold dear–perhaps even their own humanity–to destroy the last vampire.
-
My thoughts:
It’s been years since Leah Maguire lost her father and brother to a vicious creature they disturbed in a Texas cave. She couldn’t stop what happened that day, but now she’s an expert in her field and able to practice ancient rituals if she’d give herself half a chance.

When the government comes knocking with a request for her professional help, Leah has no intention of getting involved. They’re not about to let her off that easily because it seems that the same creature that once destroyed her family is on the loose and she may be the only one who possesses the knowledge to stop him.

Scott Boulder leads a unique unit of men whose talents are kept secret from the general population. Each of his team members have been enhanced through the introduction of the supernatural DNA from a centuries old corpse. Their covert group has been compromised and despite Scott’s protests they’re about to call in help.

The government’s five-hundred year old vampire has just received a wake-up call from a voodoo priestess who will let nothing stand in the way of her goal. The evil they’ve carefully controlled has been set loose on an unsuspecting community. Scott and Leah are humanity’s only hope of stopping the creature as it cuts a bloody path on his way to immortality.

With their own twist on the vampire legend, Patricia Rosemoor and Marc Paoletti have created a storyline filled with murder and mayhem. An evil that’s powered in blood, and formed by alchemy, reenters the heroine’s life and manages to turn the hero’s existence upside down. While I expected more romance, and would have liked more detail about the Black Ops team and Leah’s professional background, I found The Last Vampire to be both interesting and entertaining.

Read the prologue to The Last Vampire by clicking on the book cover: Here

Kimberly Swan, Darque Reviews

No comments: