Imperial Purple

Jennifer Rardin
Once Bitten, Twice Shy
Orbit 2007

I’m in two minds about this one. It’s another vampire book – I seem to be surrounded by them at the moment – and it’s quite well written with a well-paced story. On the other hand, it has many of the usual things that irritate me in vampire stories and I think the central character needs some extra work.

The central character, Jaz Parks, is a CIA assassin. Her partner is a super-powerful 300 year old vampire. The only downside to being dead and all-powerful is that he has to sleep during the day. Big deal. Countless shift workers can say the same thing and all they get is their pay packet and Vitamin D deficiency.

This is a bit of a personal thing but I’m very tired of vampires being essentially nocturnal supermen. There must be more to it than that. See, for example, Narelle Harris’ The Opposite of Life for a more thoughtful and interesting approach. Yet I am aware that countless vampire-novel fans disagree.

Anyway, the other thing I would like to have seen addressed is Jaz’s character. She is feisty, opinionated, loud and (as our American cousins describe it) ‘kick-ass’. I have no quarrel with this. She also kills without any remorse or consideration of the effects of her actions (other than the victim’s demise, of course). This is a characteristic of psychopaths. I have no quarrel with novels about psychopaths either but her motivations really need to be filled out.

I’m not a great fan of the these people are bad so just kill them and who cares school of diplomacy, however much support it may have at the moment. Either Jaz feels something and we should know what it is, or she should feel nothing and we should know why.

I think I’ll have to give up reviewing vampire novels. My personal tastes seem to deviate too far from those of the fan base so this review is hardly fair. Go ahead and read it – you’ll probably enjoy it a lot.