One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Series: Biting Love, Book 3
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


If you like your paranormal romances with a serious plot full of serious characters, Mary Hughes' Biting Love series isn't for you, but there are lots of paranormal romances out there that are better suited to that tone. If, however, you enjoy a book that doesn't take itself any more seriously than you should take it, then Mary Hughes is right up there with Shelly Laurenston (with her Magnus Pack series and Pride series in particular) for laugh-out-loud humor and sexy, erotic loving in paranormal romance. True, I think the Laurenston books feature characters that are better developed and plots that are more compact and tightly written, but Hughes has her good points, too. No one does quirky lead characters like Hughes, that's for sure.

Biting Me Softly is no different. Liese Schmetterling is a self-professed geek with trust issues a mile wide. She works for Meiers Corners' Blood Bank doing just about everything, including manning the front desk and keeping track of inventory. Logan Steel, CEO of Steel Security and a character we met in Biting Nixie, is in Meiers Corners for a couple of reasons...none of which include drooling all over the reluctant and doubting Liese, and yet...

While Liese can't help but melt under the supersexilitious power of Lord Logan, she doesn't trust him as far as she can throw him, and for all his shizzle, as long as she wears the glass mockery of an engagement ring her dud ex-fiance gave her, she'll keep her heart - if not her body - firmly to herself. Just...what's with Logan's fangs and red eyes??

As always, Hughes makes me laugh. Her characters make me laugh. And pant. There's no doubt Liese is a bit whacky, especially when she's having serious arguments with Good Liese and Bad Liese, the shoulder angel and demon that pull her this way and that at every decision. She's also insecure and unlike Hughes' other female leads, utterly unconvinced of her own worth. She's the first one to tell you she'll fight to the death for others but won't say boo for herself. That's a problem for this book because it's long, and it's all in Liese's first person POV. After a while, her rabid insecurity and unwavering belief in her lack of appeal started to drag the story down and I wish there'd been more of an external conflict as a driving force of plot in this book instead of the biggest conflict being Liese's own trust issues.

Also, I felt Biting Me Softly was a bit more like the first book in the series, Bite My Fire than the second book, Biting Nixie, in a few unfortunate ways. Like Bite My Fire, the male lead character was almost negligently defined. Where I got a real sense of Julian from Biting Nixie, all I was able to really understand about Logan's character was that he had an issue in his past that hurt him, and he was wildly, insanely hot for Liese. Excellent for her...not so great for a reader, because his character was very two dimensional. And again like Bite My Fire, which I didn't like nearly as much as Biting Nixie, the end of the book leapt to a romantic conclusion that hadn't been sufficiently developed through the book. Lust is not love - it's hot, it's fun, and it's delicious when it's Logan-shaped, but it's really not undying love and I think that Hughes too often gives us nothing but one for a whole book, then tries to push the other onto us too precipitously and with no true development. If Hughes can find a better balance there, and develop both her lead characters and her plot a little bit more, she can be as entertaining as Laurenston is for me. She's just not quite there yet. Still, I enjoyed Biting Me Softly, and appreciate the absolute quirky fun of Meiers Corners, all of its inhabitants, and the vampire mythos created for and around it.

Biting Love Series:
   
Novella in the Biting Love world:

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Series: Novella in the Biting Love Series World
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: Novella
Formats: Kindle


If you're unfamiliar with Mary Hughes' Biting Love series...well...rectify that as soon as possible, but don't start here. The series starts with Bite My Fire and continues with the stronger second installment, Biting Nixie, and they're fun, relatively light, but definitely sexy/steamy/erotic vamp romance novels that blend humor and danger together quite nicely. The Bite of Silence is a novella-length story within the world, though not necessarily considered a part of the series, and but it falls in the timeline between Biting Nixie and Biting Me Softly, the third book in the series. Hughes has managed to condense the best parts of her books and deliver a powerful, funny, sexual, and surprisingly complete tale in a much smaller package. I believe, however, that this story would definitely feel lacking to anyone unfamiliar with the series, so start from the beginning.

In The Bite of Silence, Nixie's best friend Twyla, Admin. Assistant for the mayor of Meier's Corners, is off to the Big Apple for a little New Year's Eve partying. When she boards the plane, however, she finds the object of her most delicious fantasies seated in first class. Niko is tall, dark, and destructively gorgeous...and Twyla's also pretty sure he's a vampire...but he has stubbornly refused to give her the time of day since he moved to town, so a two hour flight with the vamp is just what the vacation gods ordered. Niko's not as unaffected by the delectable and funny Twyla as she thinks, however...and her "vacation" surely isn't going to go as smooth as she'd hoped when she realizes that someone's trying to turn all the vampires in NYC into slavering, bloodthirsty beasts as the ball drops on the New Year and Twyla and Niko are the only two who can save a madman from destroying them all.

Points to Hughes for delivering a very well-rounded story in such a short format. There's even a bit more character development than I'd anticipated - and something that's so often lacking in stories of this length. Admittedly, I've read the first two books, so I'm already familiar with Hughes' world and vampire mythos, and I don't think that the book would read nearly as well for someone who isn't, so I rate it four stars for lacking any real world building at all. Other than that - very well told.

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Series: Biting Love, Book 2
Rating: 4.5 Stars
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


What can I say about Biting Nixie to properly convey the sense of fun and quirky freshness that's wrapped up so neatly into this delicious little package? Nixie Schmeling is a punk polka queen with her own band (Guns and Polka) and her own language (which I'd love to give an example of, but I'd fail miserably), and thanks in part to mother issues, the death of her sister, and the influence of a favored aunt, she eschews anything resembling normal. She's a bawdy, sassy, chirpy little thing. Julian Emerson, on the other hand, is a high-priced, high-powered, buttoned-up attorney who represents just about everything Nixie's ever dissed and dismissed in life.

When Nixie is maneuvered into overseeing the Meiers Corners festival to pay Julian's extremely expensive price tag to keep The Coterie from annexing Meiers Corners into Chicago, these two disparate individuals smack into each other with all the force of a napalm blast, and if Julian could just get the fiery Nixie to speak English (instead of, apparently, something more complex than sanskrit), they may realize that they're meant to be together. Regardless of the very fangy secret both the city...and Julian...have.

Biting Nixie isn't a takes-itself-seriously urban fantasy. This isn't even a takes-itself-seriously paranormal romance. You'd be hard pressed to find more than a page or two through the whole book that's in any way serious - despite some obviously dangerous themes and Nixie's own loss of her elder sister. But the book's just not supposed to be a serious endeavor. It's supposed to be funny, and fun, and raunchy, and fun, and fast-paced, and fun, and sexy, and fun. There's a lot of graphically described sexual encounters here, even though some of it's couched in dialogue that at best vaguely resembles English. If you prefer your romances to be more mass-market flavored, then Biting Nixie isn't something I'd recommend. But if you don't mind sticking your tongue firmly in your cheek and laughing your way through several hours of enjoyment and sizzle, and you're not that hung up on some plot issues that other novels in the genre don't have...like the fact that even the vampires in this series don't have a very firm grasp on what a vampire can do (like getting plastered by taking blood from drunks) or even how one is made (and that is a weak point, as the mythos has been skirted around twice now, in both this book and its predecessor, Bite My Fire: A Biting Love story)...then I'd say go for it. Biting Nixie's just a fast, light, sexy read with a truly unique female lead and a male lead that's sizzling hawt and sweet.

If I wanted to really pick the book apart, I could mention that Julian's size (he's huge everywhere) painted a nearly painful mental image when paired with the five nothing and size zero Nixie - but I didn't look too closely at that mental image so it didn't bother me. I could also be critical of the way that both books, while heavy on detail of the whacky characters filling the town of Meiers Corners, are downright anemic on the topic of vampire mythos. After two books, I don't have any sort of defined picture of the vampire species in general, and got almost no history of the two male leads in each book, Bo in Bite My Fire and Julian in Biting Nixie. But I don't feel like being critical, as I had too much fun with what the book does have to worry too much about what it doesn't. And as I'll continue the series (with the next story in the series, an in between novella, The Bite of Silence) not expecting anything beyond the same sort of light, fun, bawdy, sexual good times, I won't miss it. I'm not looking for serious or intense with this series. If you're not either, sit back and enjoy, because it's a fun ride.

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Series: Biting Love, Book 1
Rating: 3 Stars
Formats: Paperback, Kindle


Elena O'Rourke is the junior probationary police detective on the third shift, pining desperately to make full detective status, when the body of Napoleon Shrimpf falls into her lap - metaphorically. Dubbed by Elena to be The Case of the Punctured Prick, she scrambles to solve this bizarre murder as she struggles to maintain her rep as a competent cop's daughter (WWDD - "What Would Daddy Do?" is a mantra of hers) amid the frustrations of an unwanted and criminally chatty partner and under the attention of Bo Strongwell, the sexiest male she's ever seen. Despite the fact that Bo keeps turning up and turning  her on, and Elena wants nothing more than to solve her case and end an achingly long sexual drought (not necessarily in that order), he's a suspect, and puts the suspicious in 'suspicious character.'

Strongwell wants nothing more than to protect his town and his...people...until he gets his first taste of Elena, and then the Vikingesque vamp can't get enough of her scent and her taste and her. But secrets divide them, and as he tries to protect Elena and keep his true identity hidden, his growing lust and affection may draw her into a deadly threat - not only to her life, but to the future of the whole town.

I liked Bite My Fire. I thought the plot was engaging and the vampire mythos seemed original enough not to come across as a tired revamping (no pun intended). The setting, Meiers Corners, is chock full of quirky and pop-iconic tertiary characters (like the town gossip and hair cutting maven, Dolly Barton, and the CSI agent whose initials are CSI and who bears a startling resemblance to William Peterson...and for those Buffy aficionados, the vamp prostitute, Drusilla) who add a definite flavor to the mix. And too, while I didn't find it laugh-out-loud funny, I certainly found it humorous enough to make me smile quite a bit through the reading of it. But there were some problems.

Most notably, I had some issues with the two lead characters. Written in first person from Elena's point of view, I couldn't seem to truly warm to her and thought too much of her character was defined by her hormones, not enough by her intelligence. I'm all for a lusty lead, but when it's a driving personality trait to the extent it was in Bite My Fire, the character sometimes comes across about as shallow as a puddle. It's a pity, too, because there was definitely enough backstory provided to give her some depth - with the history of her parents and connection to her sister - but she focused so much on her sexuality that it muffled all the rest. And Bo was little more than a cardboard cutout of hunky male yumminess. Again, I like me some hot male vamp, but if it's the only aspect of him we really see, it makes it hard to see him as a full person. That issue made a scene at the end seem particularly jarring, when he seemed to do a complete about face from tall, blonde, sexy, and mysterious to earnest family man wannabe.

Ah, but I said most notably. I had other issues as well. Personally, I think this book would've benefited from some critical editing - not to fix errors, but to pare down and streamline the story itself. I felt the beginning, pre-Elena finding out about vampires, went on far too long. I also think what started as a shiny glitter of amusing and quirky characters slowly got dragged straight into repetition and ended up bordering tedium. Detective Dirk, for example, started out as a cute character but quickly got on my nerves. As did Elena's fleeing from him. In fact, I'd say overall I would've preferred a bit more focus on character development and the relationship between Elena and Bo, and there would've been plenty of room for that if everything that happened 3-4 times (or more) in the book had been pared down to 1-2 times (including evading Detective Dirk, confrontations with Elena's sister, descriptions of every nuance of Bo's body, and the many many reminders of how long it'd been since Elena had last had sex). Also, I had one other slightly odd issue that I can't remember having in the many paranormal romance/urban fantasy series I read. I thought the vampire mythos in this book was a bit vague and anorexic in definition. What was there seemed sort of new and potentially fresh, but there really was so little explained, and most of that not even by an actual vampire, that I couldn't quite sink my teeth into it (pun intended). The lack left that aspect of the world far less clear in my mind than the setting, and as it's a vampire paranormal, I think that's a problem.

All that being said, I did like the book and I'm going to be reading Biting Nixie: A Biting Love Novel, which, if I understand correctly, was the first book published, but the second in the timeline of the Biting Love series. I may be wrong about that, though - I'm a bit confused on the point - so don't quote me.