It was ok. A lot like many of the other vampire series. ( )

I have owned this for so long I honestly don't remember if I had heard about this book or if it just looked cool but either way, I had no idea what this was about. I didn't even know this was about vampires and supernatural stuff. I found the story to be fine but I didn't love it and the formatting of the book drove me crazy.

I am not usually a person who notices grammar stuff in books. I'm much more likely to notice repetition in dialogue or plots but the way this book was written really distracted me. All the dialogue is formatted with em-dashes instead of quotation marks and there are no dialogue tags at all. Here's an example.

—What’d they call it?
—Uh, Gruesome quadruple homicide.
—Shit.
—Looks pretty sloppy, Joe.
—Yeah, well, there weren’t a lot of options.
—Uh-huh, sure, sure. What was it?

I personally believe that if you're going to do nonstandard things with punctuation there should be a story relevant reason for doing so. I might feel differently about this if only the vampires had this sort of punctuation so that it was a way of using grammar to show that they weren't human or something but as it was applied to everyone's speech, it just distracted me. I don't know if this is the normal style for this author but I didn't like it.

The story was fine and had moments I liked. Joe is a fairly typical "good guy" who is kinda disguising that and I enjoyed that. The mystery was interesting enough and had some interesting turns. I wouldn't say it was completely surprising but I also didn't predict everything. The world-building was interesting. There are basically vampire mobs and they each control parts of NYC.. Learning about the different ideologies of the groups were one of the more interesting parts of this book. There were some characters I would have liked more of. Joe has a kind of love interest, Evie, but she's almost completely a non-character and we barely know anything about her except her relationship to Joe.

This book was good enough that I'll consider continuing with this series if I can easily get them from the library but I won't be purchasing the others. I think a lot of people who may want a less traditional vampires story might enjoy this and I would say if this sounds interesting to give it a shot. ( )

Violent tough guy vamp. Manhattan gang politics and the metaphisical ramifications of vamp infection. A true scion of Hammet. ( )

Th story tended towards the gross, but the writing was great. I'll try some others by Charlie ... ( )

I found the sequels from a used book sale, but not the first book, and wanted to start from the beginning. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and found the book to be too dark, without much humor. I’m not sure if I like this world, and the writing is a bit sparse. ( )