Doing It Right

By MaryJanice Davidson

Contains the short novel, Thief of Hearts, and the short story, Wild Hearts. 

Doctor Jared had a close encounter with Kara, the cat burgler and one-woman wrecking crew, who puts a big thug down right before Jared eyes. The thug, a minor crime boss, was trying to kill Kara, who is a potential witness against him if the police ever manage to nab her.
Kara is now worried that the thug will be coming after Doctor Jared and she appoints herself his body guard. Probably not motivated by the young doctor's devastating good looks. And Jared happily accepts her presence in his life since she is as beautiful as her nickname, AA, or Avenging Angel.
Kara has a lot of baggage in her background and she is unwilling or unable to accept that Jared has fallen hard for her. Even though they are soon having sex, she secretly believes he will turn his back on her, if he ever learns the truth. Namely that she is a thief (of the Robin Hood variety, if you substitute the rich for rich criminals) and a foster child who bounced from home to home, never finding a safe place to land. She has never had the love and the advantages that Jared himself enjoyed and she fears he will hold that against her.
Eventually she decides to go after the thug and a sacrifice herself to save Jared and to save herself from his inevitable rejection, as she believes.

This was an OK read. The thing is, it is described on the cover as "wickedly funny." But I would say, mildly amusing at best. I was conned by the "wickedly funny" and ended up reading a book that was just your basic explicit romance novel. Some of the sex scenes in the book are four to five pages long. I mostly skipped those, being a bit of a skeptic. I was wanting to read a funny romance story. Instead I got mildly amusing porn. Eh, OK if you like that sort of thing. I mostly don't care for graphic and improbable descriptions of sex acts. The book was not what I was looking for, so I was disappointed. Not really the book's fault, though. And not the first time I have been fooled and disappointed by blurbs on a book cover.

Undead and Unreturnable

By Mary Janice Davidson

Fourth in Davidson's Undead series about vampire queen Betsy Taylor, this one finds Betsy in the midst of her wedding plans to vampire king Eric Sinclair when her cop friend Nick shows up to tell to beware of a serial killer who is preying on women of Betsy's type, tall and blond. Betsy dismisses his concerns since she is a vampire and more than capable of dealing with any threat posed by a would-be killer. Still she is forced to deal with the killer when Cathie, the ghost of his latest victim, shows up demanding justice.

This was the first novel in this series that I had come across. It stands on its own, but reading the first three books probably would have been helpful. Lots of characters from the previous stories show up in this one, in fact they trot in and out of the story constantly. I had to make a list just to keep track of them all.
Even though a killer is running amok, the novel doesn't really focus on that part of the plot. Mostly it is about Betsy rocky romance with Sinclair. They have their little spats and disagreements, many of which concern the impending wedding, and then they have torrid makeup sex.
There are lots of intriguing characters in the story, like Betsy's demon sister Laura and George the Fiend who lives in the basement. I would have liked more of the story to be about them. Lots of other characters make brief appearances designed, I guess, to provoke conflict between Betsy and Eric so they can quarrel again and screw again.

Betsy is queen of the vampires but she seems totally unsuited to the job, coming off as ditsy and silly. The novel doesn't really go anywhere as the serial killer plot is not the main focus of the story. It's a pretty shallow story aimed mainly at leading the reader on to the next one in the series. Some of the characters and ideas in the book are really interesting but this novel just wasn't that compelling or even all that funny. Although I have read that the first three books are supposed to be pretty good.

For another review see Crescent Blue Book Views.