Ruthless and brilliant, Vishous, son of the Bloodletter, possesses a destructive curse and a frightening ability to see the future. As a pretrans growing up in his father’s war camp he was tormented and abused. As a member of the Brotherhood, he has no interest in love or emotion, only the battle with the Lessening Society. But when a mortal injury puts him in the care of human surgeon, Dr. Jane Whitcomb compels him to reveal his inner pain and taste true pleasure for the first time-until a destiny he didn’t choose takes him into a future that cannot include her..

This book was amazing in a lot of ways. Who would have thought I would go ga-ga over a bisexual, seriously dominant, kinda scary guy like Vishous? Well I fell, flat on my face. This guy is amazing. He is extremely attractive, imagine big, tall, ice blue eyes, black hair (I’m a sucker for blue eyes and black hair), and extremely intelligent also.

The way that JR Ward wrote this book did it. She put so much love and effort into telling this man’s story that you couldn’t help but love him. I love his selfless love for Butch. I love how he looked at Jane and saw his soulmate. I love that he fights for the Brothers and helps them out in manifold ways.

Also I cry for the torture and abuse he suffered at the hands of his so-called father. And what amounts to neglect from his mother. And then she wants him to step up as Primale and leave behind all that he loves…. Man. And not to mention having to give up Butch but always be there for him.

This book really ripped away at my heart. I couldn’t put it down.

I really liked Jane. She was very down to earth and likable. But tough at the same time. Most people would have flipped out when they were exposed to a world that was so different from what they knew. She took it like a champ. And she never even blinked at the fact that Vishous was in love with another man and was seriously into bondage and stuff. She accepted him for who he was. Jane fits into the Brotherhood’s life like a long-lost puzzle. She is the half to Vishous’ whole that he was missing. She doesn’t replace Butch but she still gives Vishous the love and acceptance he deserved for so long.

My Gemstone Rating:

Rayea isn’t daddy’s little girl, even if he is the most powerful fallen angel around. He wants her to take an active role in the family business. But she’s not interested in his schemes for world domination. Instead she wants to spend her time shopping on the Internet, rescuing humans from a horrific eternity, and practicing martial arts with her seven foot hellhound. Then one day everything changes. Here’s the first part of her story about how it all began.

A short novella or intro to the Vampire from Hell series. The author has added an alternative ending to the first novella and then added an excerpt from the second book and the third book.
The story is linked to a virtual blog, which offers extra chapters and insights into the characters.
The concept was fairly interesting, having a demon vampire related to Lucifer. That opens up many different doors and options.
I felt it was a little rushed. The dialogue and interaction was very youngish and a little stiff. It didn’t flow well, which is a shame.
I think if it is given more depth and developed with a little more intensity, that it could be a good little series.

My Gemstone Rating:

Mother, wife, private investigator…vampire. Six years ago federal agent Samantha Moon was the perfect wife and mother, your typical soccer mom with the minivan and suburban home. Then the unthinkable happens, an attack that changes her life forever. And forever is a very long time for a vampire.

Now the world at large thinks Samantha has developed a rare skin disease, a disease which forces her to quit her day job and stay out of the light of the sun. Now working the night shift as a private investigator, Samantha is hired by Kingsley Fulcrum to investigate the murder attempt on his life, a horrific scene captured on TV and seen around the country. But as the case unfolds, Samantha discovers Kingsley isn’t exactly what he appears to be; after all, there is a reason why he survived five shots to the head.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. It was a freebie that actually sounded interesting so I picked it up. But, once I started reading it I had to finish it as quickly as possible. It’s a fast read. The story is a modern take on vampires that are “real people”, meaning they do laundry, carpool and watch Judge Judy. Apparently they also have marriage problems, squabbling kids and irrational cravings for Ding Dong’s.

As I said, overall I enjoyed the book. There are a few things that have annoyed me (and in the following books) and that would be the amount of repetition. We are told repeatedly that she can only drink blood, water or wine. Every time food or drink is mentioned it is repeated. Now, it’s interesting the first time or two to hear that of all things she can drink white wine is one of them but not to be told repeatedly.

Also, she’s constantly thinking about how good looking men are and brings it up in every interaction with another character. It’s not a very female thing to do (in general) so it’s a bit off-putting as a female reader. Yes, I might recognize that someone is nice looking but it’s unlikely to go beyond a fleeting thought. J.R. Rain seems to feel that women constantly think about men and their attributes. Every time she meets a new character (nearly always male) the first thing we learn is what physical attributes they have and what Sam thinks of them. It doesn’t matter what role the character plays, Sam is attracted to them on some level. It’s a bit tedious.

Another reviewer mentioned how fleeting the interactions were with Kingsley and how quickly things moved for them and I’d have to agree. The book is short and much of it is spent explaining (and repeating) Sam’s life so the actual meat of the story is limited. It’s not detailed and drawn it. The telling of it is drawn out and details are given to you to pull you along but it is quite anticlimatic in the end.

I’d like to learn more about the medallion. It’s brought up several times in the story and then in the end just disappears from the story. I think that it’s an interesting aspect of the story and we’re teased with it and then left to wonder. A lot of time and attention was spent on her developing abilities, they all come very easily to her and that’s a little boring. I’d like to see her not excel at everything. She’s not very real to me as a character. Yes, she’s a vampire but we still need to connect with her.

I know it sounds like I don’t really like the story but I did. I just find that it’s not a perfect story.

 

My Gemstone Rating:

Butch was not a character I took to right away in the other Black Dagger Brotherhood novels. So when it came time to read his book in the series I will admit I was thinking just to plow through the book and try not to think too much about it. I regret that choice and I regret thinking less of Butch O’Neil. Once again J.R Ward has brought her delicious writing style with her blend of sensual seduction and fast moving action into Lover Revealed. J.R Ward lets us delve more into the back story of Butch why he has been a bit of a drunkard in the past but we than also find out what he has been thinking now.

If you have read the other books you know that he has been living with the Brotherhood. By Lover Revealed he has started to want to get out from under the living situation. It is not because he feels any less loyal to the Brothers, but he wants to feel like his own man. Anyone can understand that right? There is of course the tension still remaining between him and Wraths Ex Mate Marissa.

While I enjoyed the book there are still a few parts that get to me I am still not a fan at all of the “slayers”. The pieces with the slayers are not written badly they are just as good as any other bits it is simply the slayers are annoying and you wish their baby powder smelling selves should just go away. That said there is one interesting bit that crops up and blends well with the entire story having to do with the slayers. So if you enjoy the Black Dagger Brotherhood series you will enjoy Lover Revealed.

Small-town cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse has had more than her share of experience with the supernatural—but now it’s really hitting close to home. When Sookie sees her brother Jason’s eyes start to change, she knows he’s about to turn into a were-panther for the first time—a transformation he embraces more readily than most shapeshifters she knows. But her concern becomes cold fear when a sniper sets his deadly sights on the local changeling population, and Jason’s new panther brethren suspect he may be the shooter. Now, Sookie has until the next full moon to find out who’s behind the attacks—unless the killer decides to find her first…

I’m going to just put this out there: Lestat is among the most fascinating minds I’ve ever been inside in literature. He just is. I understand that this is an erotic horror novel but that doesn’t diminish the truth of that statement. This book holds up to the test of time. I re-read it , and found out that I had not had a silly teenage fancy about it.

Lestat is just one of those… well the main review says Faustian, and I’m going to have to agree. His journey through sensuality, spirtuality, violence and meaning is one of the most fascinating I’ve ever read. It comes to a culmination in “Memnoch the Devil,” I feel, but this is where it begins. Lestat is a thoroughgoing bastard with lines like “I can’t help that I’m a gorgeous fiend. It’s just a card a drew,” and “I don’t like myself, you know. I love myself, and I’m committed to myself to my dying day, but I don’t like myself.” You can’t help but want to know more about him. Mythical, poetic, grand, larger than life. He just sucks you up into his story. I defy anyone to read this and not end up caring for this mind deeply. It’s just so beautiful. I think his journey through the chronicles is very much Odysseus-like. Except that he does not know where his home is, and he rejects the very idea of it. But that’s what he’s searching for all the same.

Perhaps I got attached to these at a young age, so I have a different perspective. But I think you can appreciate his passion, and the beauty with which it is expressed until a far older age than that.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks, as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . .


He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir–young, romantic, cultivated–to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the “endless,” life . . . learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings . . . to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the “superior” sensual pleasures.


He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him . . .


We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire–all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child–and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court . . . night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death–a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below . . .


We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be . . .


We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théâtre des Vampires–the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within . . . to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled . . .

Interview with the Vampire” is a truly remarkable book and this is by far not the first time I have read it, but the first time I review it. Without claiming to be a fantasy know-it-all, I’d like to say that the characters in this book are probably some of the most well-developed fantasy creatures out there. Each one has their own doubts, fears, hopes, and a whole system of values. They might not always act as expected from them, but then again, do they have to be perfect, all-knowing, wise and so very distant from humans every single time? What Anne Rice has created is not only a work of fiction, but also a study of psychology.

I have never read a book which goes so deeply into vampire nature, telling us a whole new story of insecurity, where dark thoughts battle with the constant fascination by the world; where the need to be together with somebody of your own kind overcomes all obstacles, even your own hatred; where the struggle for knowledge fights for its existence with the fear that there might be nothing to know; where cold comfort meets change. And all this is so stylish, so dark and dangerous, that nobody dares to think these vampires are funny or stupid.

Isn’t it paradoxical that the book’s approach to fantastic creatures is so logical, yet so rarely used in modern-day fantasy literature? After all, some of them have been humans before their transformation, right? Why does no one pay attention to their struggle after becoming vampires for example? Where does the presumption that they suddenly become encyclopedias come from?! I’m not saying the human psychological approach towards them doesn’t exist, such a thing I cannot claim, but it still is an uncommon concept. Perhaps it’s harder to think before writing, to analyze the options and get to know your own characters, to predict their every move. All too often, modern-day authors just find in fantasy an easy way to escape all logic and write whatever comes out from under their fingers. That is why, I fear, literature teachers will always retain their negative attitude towards fantasy. Which is a shame.

A former blood slave, the vampire Zsadist still bears the scars from a past filled with suffering and humiliation. Renowned for his unquenchable fury and sinister deeds, he is a savage feared by humans and vampires alike. Anger is his only companion, and terror is his only passion—until he rescues a beautiful aristocrat from the evil Lessening Society.


Bella is instantly entranced by the seething power Zsadist possesses. But even as their desire for one another begins to overtake them both, Zsadist’s thirst for vengeance against Bella’s tormentors drives him to the brink of madness. Now, Bella must help her lover overcome the wounds of his tortured past, and find a future with her

I can admit based on the first two books Z was my least favorite of the brotherhood, although occasionally I found myself wondering if he was not just acting so nasty because everyone expected him to especially in book 2 but I just could not connect with him. I think that is however what was intended we were not supposed to like him, until his book.


Lover Awakened is a great book, it is well written and it truly gives you understanding on why Z is the way he is, we get his full story the abuses he took were well beyond the realm of only being a blood slave. I cried for him, and I cried for other things as well but I will not put them in my review because they are spoilers. Z pushes so hard for Bella to prefer the “un-broken” brother his brother Phury, but she refuses. There is angst as always, but in the end the right thing happens at the right time. Z truly comes to be whole to take his place among the Brotherhood and be more than a killer, he truly becomes a warrior.


By the end of this book I had fully changed my my mind on Z, while he won’t replace my favorite just yet of Rhage he is now loved by me. Well done it is not often I go from absolutely not liking a character to making me love them. 


I still do not like the lessers I get why they are there but they bore me. John Matthew is going to be great once we get into his full story and bless Butch for his pinning, though I wonder what V did to him, I bet you do now too.

Within the brotherhood, Rhage is the vampire with the strongest appetites. He’s the best fighter, the quickest to act on his impulses, and the most voracious lover-for inside him burns ferocious curse cast by the Scribe Virgin. Owned by this dark side, Rhage fears the time when his inner dragon is unleashed, making him a danger to everyone around him.

Mary Luce, a survivor of many hardships is unwittingly thrown into the vampire world and reliant to Rhage’s protection. With a life-threatening curse of her own, Mary is not looking for love. She lost her faith in miracles years ago. But when Rhage’s intense animal attraction turns into something more emotional, he knows that he must make Mary his alone. And while their enemies close in, Mary fights desperately to gain life eternal with the one she loves.

The second book in the series of the Black Dagger Brotherhood and I have to say the series is getting better. While I really get bored with the chapters are partial chapters on the lessers and the omega I think it may be just because I get so into the stories that the Brothers are having and do not want to be interrupted with that stuff.

Rhage was my favorite from the first book, I was eager and curious to know more about him and how he got his curse. The book did not disappoint in teaching us what happened, and how he handled his monster. That on first look Rhage is not what he appears to be. The love story of Rhage and Mary is sweet, touching and truly a joy to read. Two people with a lot of baggage learning that they do not have to carry it alone.