Tag: f

First Strike by Justin Sloan, Kyle Noe + George S. Mahaffey Jr.

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Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

Not sure I’ve ever read a book with three authors before, though Amazon omit Noe from the list given on Goodreads. This “novel by committee” might explain some of the problems with this, and its failure to mesh the two strands in any effective way. It’s a pity, as it starts off in entirely blistering fashion, with the arrival on Earth of the Syndicate, an extra-terrestrial invading army. We knew they were coming, so humanity’s forces take them on, in a massive and spectacular battle at their landing site in Mexico. It doesn’t go well for us, thanks to the attacker’s vastly superior technology. Survivors are few, but include Marines Quinn and Giovanni.

The former is one of the soldiers abducted by the Syndicate and taken up into their orbiting mother-ship. There, she’s given an ultimatum: fight for the Syndicate or be turned into a mindless zombie… and fight for them anyway. With a 12-year-old daughter, Sammy, back on Earth – albeit status unknown – Quinn decides to accept the offer, but keeps her fingers crossed, so to speak. She teams up with another abductee, a scientist who might have found the germ of a way by which the Syndicate can be defeated. Though they’ll have to stop their employers from finding out about it.

This aspect isn’t too bad, with no shortage of solid action sequences, even if I’m still not sure about the method behind their plan. Except there was time travel involved. Definitely time travel. Somehow. Anyway, it’s the kind of thing I can easily imagine becoming a major Hollywood picture. That makes some sense, since Mahaffey’s bio says he’s a screenwriter – despite his IMDb listing including nothing to have ever made it to the screen. The problems are back on Earth where Giovanni has joined up with the resistance and… Well, nothing of importance happens. Possibly his character becomes relevant in future volumes, but here, he serves little or no purpose to proceedings.

Oh, except for being gay, that is. I’ve no problem with that, but it’s handled in such an incredibly clumsy way. It’s announced as he and his lover, Luke, “had largely ignored whatever it was that had happened that night between them.” Except that’s the first we heard of it. I literally went flicking back to try and see if I’d skipped something. But short of there being an entire chapter missing, there was nothing. And then there’s this sentence, which literally made me cringe when I read it. “‘FUCK ME!’ Luke shouted, and Giovanni couldn’t help but think how under different circumstances he would love to hear those words.” Giovanni’s near-absence from much of the second half of the book is likely a blessing, but his presence in the first half almost single-handedly destroyed any interest for me in reading further installments.

Author: Justin Sloan, Kyle Noe + George S. Mahaffey Jr.
Publisher: Elder Tree Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 5 in the Syndicate Wars series.

The Furnace

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★★★
“Run Mary Run”

Two days after getting married, Mary Harris (Bernadette) is involved in a car accident which kills her new husband and leaves her barely able to walk. But she has one goal: to compete in the Furnace, an ultra-marathon race through the African wilderness, in which she and her late husband had been planning to take part. This aim goes strongly against the desires of her mother, but Mary won’t be deterred. With the help of her mentor (Dlamini, looking like a younger version of Morgan Freeman), nicknamed “Coffin” due to his day-job as a gravedigger, she claws her way back to fitness, and to the start-line. But is she prepared for everything the environment can throw at her, and make it to the finish? To do so, she’ll have to overcome not just the lethal heat, but also predators for whom she’d be a tasty snack, and poisonous scorpions whose venom induces disorienting hallucinations.

It’s certainly a change of pace for Bernadette, who has previously been seen on this site in Killing Joan and All Girls Weekend, as well as the largely woeful I Spit On Your Grave reboot, Deja Vu, not reviewed here. This is a film heavy on the F-word – by which I mean “faith”. Its religious overtones may be enough to write it off for many, but even as someone who possesses no real commitment there, it still worked well enough as a story about fighting through and triumphing over adversity. The race itself is the most effective section, with a constant stream of problems to overcome, and fortunately that does represent the majority of the film’s running-time. I must admit, I guessed the truth about her running companion, Raphaella (Linn) well before the film revealed it, and that angle is perhaps one where the faith-based elements become more than a little overwhelming.

Exhaustive research i.e. five minutes of Googling, couldn’t locate any race comparable with the Furnace, and it does seem a highly perilous endeavour, even with a GPS attached to participants. “If you’re stationary for more than seven hours, you’re disqualified, and we come pick you up,” says the organizer. Shouldn’t that be “If you’re stationary for more than seven hours, you’ve been eaten by hyenas, and we come pick up whatever is left in a bucket”? It’s certainly not my idea of a challenge to which I aspire, but there are people like Mary who seek to push their limits, so it’s not that far-fetched. Throw in decent cinematography and animal work and you’ve got something that  entertained me rather more than I perhaps expected, though Coffin’s voice-over does become a little superfluous in places. It’s not a film which an atheist is likely going to be able to appreciate, yet dammit, even I found myself getting fractionally emotional for the final scene. I’d probably be more inclined to credit Peters’s performance for that, rather than any kind of divine intervention.

Dir: Darrell Roodt
Star: Jamie Bernadette, Luthuli Dlamini, Laura Linn, Thandi Puren

Fatal Destiny, by David DeLee

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Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

Grace deHaviland is a former cop, fired from the force in Columbus, Ohio under circumstances which remain murky. To continue in the justice field, she turns to bail enforcement, bringing in perps who have gone on the lam in exchange for a percentage of their bond. They don’t necessarily want to come in, as we find out right at the start; her first target causes Grace almost to become a victim herself, save for the grace of her stun-gun. Following this, she gets to take on what should, in theory, be a nice, simple case: locating white-collar criminal Barry Keegan. He was the accountant for a pharmaceutical firm engaged in shady financial practices, and has skipped bail shortly before the trial involving him and the company’s head honchos.

Except, of course, it’s never as easy as that. Almost before deHaviland can begin, one of Keegan’s co-defendants turns up with a bullet in his head, and her target has also very badly beaten up Grace’s best friend, who is still on the local force. It has now become personal as a result, and making matters worse, she isn’t the only one with a deep interest in locating Keegan. He, meanwhile, wants to spirit his wife and child out of town, because there are secrets in his past beyond some dodgy book-keeping for a drug company, potentially a threat to him, his family and even our heroine, if she gets too close to the truth. And her former colleagues in law enforcement are none too happy with what they perceive as her interference in their case.

deHavilland has so much baggage, she would probably need a moving van to go get coffee in the morning. As well as her time with the police, her mother was raped and killed by her boyfriend, and she has massive trust issues as a result. The cop in charge of the case is also a former lover of Grace’s. And yet, she’s so incredibly rich she has multiple tricked-out cars, and operates out of a massive, sprawling factory which would put Wayne Industries to shame. It even has an “Olympic-sized swimming pool”. On the second floor. I was distracted for quite a bit by figuring out how that worked, considering such a pool contains over 2,750 tons of water. It’s all just too much. And that’s not even mentioning her mixed Hispanic-Irish heritage, or her gratuitous pet monkey called Trouble.

The action is fairly sparse, especially in the first half. After you get past the initial introduction, she’s mostly going from place to place talking to people, to the extent this feels more like a novelization of a Lifetime original movie than anything adequately kick-ass. Things do perk up a bit on the second half, with a gun-battle at Keegan’s house, and a well-written climax at an abandoned shopping mall, which was very easy to visualize. It’s still the very definition of “too little, too late,” and this is not a heroine with whom I’m very interested in spending any more time.

Author: David DeLee
Publisher: Dark Road Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Grace deHaviland Bounty Hunter series.

Special Female Force

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★★★
“The Inspector Still Wears Skirts”

I’m not sure how much this is an official remake of The Inspector Wears Skirts, the 1988 franchise-launching action comedy which we covered earlier this month. It is certainly very close in both content and tone, but I’ve not seen a formal acknowledgement of this from anyone involved. While I’m obviously happy to see a reboot of one of the pioneers of the Hong Kong girls-with-guns genre, I just wish they hadn’t also rebooted the weaknesses as well as the strengths. In particular, they could have left all of the lame comedy in the eighties, and I’d have had no complaints at all.

It begins in decent style, with a group of female police officers laying a trap for a notorious terrorist known as “The President” at a pool in a hotel complex. Except, it goes badly wrong, with a number of the officers getting killed – quite brutally by action-comedy standards. 25 years later, the survivor, Madam Fong (Leung – yep, Black Cat herself is back on the scene – though she lets the next generation do the work here) is a trainer, who is about to take in the next class of candidates. We focus on Group D, which is where all the least-talented candidates are dumped, including Fa (Sam). Her mother, Macy, was one of the victims in that long-ago shootout, and Fa still bears a grudge against Fong for Mom’s death.

Before we get to anything approaching that, however, we have to trudge through the painfully predictable middle section of the film. Crank up those training montages, folks, as a series of the most obvious character tropes (the fat one, the busty one, the lesbian) learn the ropes and bond with each other. While you’re at it, also crank up the soap-opera complications, and naturally, the discovery that failing together as a team, is better than succeeding as individuals [welcome to post-colonial Hong Kong, folks…] For it’s not enough to stop Group D from getting booted out. But, wait! Turns out, this was just a ruse so that they could go into double secret undercover work, jet-setting off to Malaysia where The President – looking surprisingly youthful – has turned up.

He’s about to launch a scheme to spread a bioweapon across SE Asia, which will spread like lighting because it’s contagious before any symptoms are shown. Watching this while staying at home due to the coronavirus, I certainly went “Hmmm… There is a nice double twist here, which sets up a thoroughly explosive finale. This does a decent job of almost making you forget what you have trudged through over the course of the previous hour, as Fa inevitably gets the chance to redeem her mother. It’s all very slickly assembled, even if it seems aimed as much at providing fan service, with its heroines notably under-dressed for combat. That’s when not getting full-on moist, because the final battle takes place in a river. Which likely tells you all you need to know about the director’s motivations.

Dir: Wilson Chin
Star: Eliza Sam, Anita Chui, Cathryn Lee, Jade Leung

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The Furies

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★★★½
“The Most Dangerous Game (mixed doubles edition)”

There has been a whole slew of films over the year which have been based on the theme of “hunting humans”. Initially, this Australian entry seems to be going straight down the same line. Kayla (Dodds) has an argument in the street with her best friend. After the latter storms off, Kayla hears her shout for help, but while investigating, is herself abducted. She wakes to find herself in a crate in the middle of some very remote woods. She discovers other women in the same situation, and that they are being chased by beweaponed, masked men with very unpleasant intentions. The area is ring-fenced with electronic barriers which block any exit: survival is going to require Kayla to tap into her inner savage.

All of which is largely as standard, save for some eye-poppingly intense gore. This starts early on, with someone losing the front of their face to an ax. Very slowly. [It was at this point I stopped the film until Chris got home, so she and I could watch it together. Yeah: our “date nights” are a little strange!] There were similarly impressive moments throughout, with a preponderance of practical effects, of which I’m always a fan. Anyway, back at the plot, the other twist also becomes apparent, in that the masked attackers are not operating as one. Indeed, the opening sequence makes clear that them attacking each other is also part of the “game”. And, it turns out, the same goes for the supposed victims. Not for nothing are the crates which hold them and the women labelled “Beast #X” and “Beauty #Y” as appropriate… 

This is a very smart move, adding a whole skein of twists to proceedings, and giving a set-up where Kayla doesn’t know who she can trust on either side. The resulting paranoia brings so much potential for conflict, it is actually a shame the angle doesn’t really blossom until the final third. It would have been more fun, and certainly more obviously “different”, if the ground rules had been established from the beginning. Perhaps with an induction video given by a hyper-perky presenter, as in Battle Royale. There’s definitely a sense of a bigger picture here, which is only glimpsed occasionally. Knowing more about it would have made for a different, and arguably better, experience. The same goes for the technological beats, which raise more questions than they answer.

Another interesting aspect is that there is not a single speaking role for a man in the film. That’s not something you see often, especially in the horror genre. Given the first time we see the heroine, she and her friend are graffiting “FUCK PATRIARCHY” on a wall, this is presumably not accidental, though the movie never puts the message ahead of its story. While men are seen and not heard, the movie makes it clear that women are hardly saintly creatures, inevitably relegated to the role of victim. It turns out, they can be just as malevolently vicious as men. And that, I feel, is true equality at work.

Dir: Tony D’Aquino
Star: Airlie Dodds, Linda Ngo, Taylor Ferguson, Ebony Vagulans

The Fatal Raid

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★★★
“Back in black”

“Guess who’s back, back again. Jadey’s back, tell a friend…” Okay, that’s as close as you’re ever going to get as a rap from me. But I was genuinely delighted to see this stared Jade Leung, who was perhaps the final top-tier member of the Hong Kong Girls With Guns club. I thought she had gone the way of Cynthia Khan and Yukari Oshima, vanishing off the radar entirely. It turns out, she had been making TV series and stuff. Leung returned to big-scale movies in 2016’s Special Female Force (review coming in due course), and followed up with this. It was, apparently, originally intended as a sequel to Force, though that notion appears to have quietly been forgotten, perhaps due to SFF‘s less than stellar box-office returns.

She plays Madam Fong, who was part of a botched clandestine operation by Hong Kong police in nineties Macao, which led to several deaths. However, due to the off-book nature of the op, this means no compensation could be paid to the officers’ families. This has sat very badly with another party to the operation, Inspector Tam (Tam), over the decades since. Finally, he gets the chance to do something, as Fong, along with policewoman Alma (Ho) and Interpol agent Zi Han (Lin) are sent to Macao to protect a high-ranking Hong Kong official. They come under target from a group of drug-crazed anarchists… yet there may be more going on to this than meets the eye.

It’s all kinda okay. The action sequences are solid, starting with a stakeout which turns hyper violent, and building through some severely intense gun-battles. There is also some flippy, spinny stuff which looks like a cross between lucha libre and MMA, and is rather impressive. The problem is mostly the stuff between the action, with a plot that doesn’t really make much sense, and characters that I frequently had trouble distinguishing from each other. Admittedly, the latter may partly be a result of the story’s failure to hold my interest. By the end, I was more or less checked out, only truly paying attention when the sound of gunfire brought me back in. To the film’s credit, there was quite a lot of that, and some seriously heavy weaponry to boot.

It was quite easy to see how it could have been a sequel to Special Female Force. That similarly opened with a mission that went savagely wrong, and also had a character who was the daughter of someone killed in the incident. But it definitely has a less comedic tone, veering considerably closer to the “heroic bloodshed” sub-genre. I must confess, it did get a bonus half-star for the very last shot, which, out of nowhere, promised a potential reboot of the Black Cat franchise. I likely got considerably more excited about that, than anything else this had to offer. Still, it was just nice to see Leung again, almost regardless of quality.

Dir: Jacky Lee
Star: Jade Leung, Patrick Tam, Jeana Ho, Lin Min-chen

Fear University 1-3

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

I was initially a bit concerned this was going to be a slightly-more horror oriented version of Harry Potter, based largely off the title. I needn’t have been worried. For at least the first two books, this is quite startlingly dark and on the razor’s edge. As for the third… well, we’ll get to it. The setting here is a world where Filipino shapeshifters called aswangs, which feed on the fear of their victims, are migrating across from their home country and through Alaska. Lined up to stop them, by any means necessary, are hunters; it’s a harsh and often brief occupation. To replace those lost in battle, the titular establishment exists on Kodiak Island, to train hunters – mostly members of families who have been in the bloody business for generations.

Into this comes Ollie Andrews, a waitress who kills an aswang, and is recruited (well, abducted is probably closer) into Fear University. Her survival is largely down to an unusual illness/talent: her inability to feel pain. No pain = no fear, and so nothing an aswang can use against her. However, this ability has caused her issues in the past – not least,  her abduction by a father/son pair of psychopaths. Though Ollie escaped, killing the father in the process, she has been pursued by the survivor, Max. This has forced Ollie to change her identity and keep on the move to avoid him tracking her down. FU [I’m not sure if the author chose the name for that acronym!] might offer her somewhere to belong, replacing the family she never had.

Keyword: might. For she has to overcome the prejudices of the other students, due to Ollie not being from one of those historic families. And that’s just the start, as she begins to discover the university’s quest to win the war under its head, Dean Bogrov and his shady scientific experiments. It also turns out there is a third group, operating between the aswangs and the humans, and Ollie’s past comes back into play; she was an orphan who never knew her father, and whose mother abandoned her in a closet. That’s an awful lot to unpack, and for the first two books, Collett does an admirable job. It’s a gritty approach, with Ollie a severely-damaged heroine, who has enough issues for an entire conference.

Those opening two books keep the story going forward. In the first volume, Fear University, she learns to tap into the power her talent gives her; builds a relationship with the similarly-broken young hunter Luke, who is her mentor; discovers aswang saliva can make her feel pain; finds out who her father was; and has to go through a life-or-death test involving both her, and her best friend at FU, Sunny. The second, Killing Season, is a rather drastic change in approach, with Ollie, Luke and others sent north to Barrow for the winter break, when the aswang are most active.  That was the location used for vampire action film 30 Days of Night, and serves the same kind of purpose here. However, it’s almost as much a whodunnit, with the large house which is the hunters’ base apparently home to a killer. Not helping matters: Max shows up in town.

Then there’s the third… I should probably have detected the change in approach, based entirely on the title: Monster Mine. For sadly, the series loses its edge entirely. Rather than turning into Harry Potter, it instead becomes something which combines the whiny angst of the Twilight series, with the Daddy issues from Star Wars. That’s about as appetizing as it sounds, and by the end, this was a chore to slog through. To the point, indeed, that the free novella included in this omnibus edition, was left entirely unread. Collett does, at least, tie things up reasonably well, giving the reader some closure. It’s a pity that the groundwork laid for a memorable anti-heroine over the first two volumes, evaporates so drastically in the third.

Author: Meg Collett
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Books 1-3 of 5 in the Fear University series.

Fatal Defense

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★★½
“There is nothing that’s going to empower you more, than if you kick the crap out of somebody. “

Single mother Arden Walsh (Scott) and her daughter Emma (Guest) are traumatized by a home invasion, and at the insistence of mom’s cop sister, Gwen (Fortier), Arden signs on for a self-defense class given by the hunky Logan Chase (Cade). He’s a bit… intense, shall we say. Despite some initial bonding over their ex-marriedness, it’s not too long before Arden discovers his methods leave “unconventional” lying in the dust. Probably about the point where he zip-ties Arden and tosses her in the trunk of his car. At this stage, she decides to forego further classes. Except, Logan is having none of it, and even teams up with the original burglar to put Arden through further “training”.

By this point, I’ve seen enough Lifetime TVM to know where this was going, and if you’re a regular here, you’ll have read enough reviews to figure it out as well. Logan ends up kidnapping Emma, in order to lure Arden to her final “examination”. Though I can’t help thinking, this works mostly as a tacit commercial for firearm ownership. If Arden had only followed Gwen’s advice in the self-defense department – rather than responding, “I’m not gonna have a gun in my house with Emma, no way” – the problem which is Logan would have been solved a) a great deal more quickly, and b) with considerably less trauma for little Emma. The finale, involving the intervention of detective Inspector Banks (Sherilyn Fenn), kinda proves this point.

The biggest flaw is the lack of credible motive for Logan. It’s not quite clear what he’s trying to do here. Seems like Arden is not his first victim, and he has clearly been unhinged by the loss of his wife during a rural robbery. Yet I can’t help but think there were easier ways to achieve his (ill-defined) goals, not least because he seems almost to want to die at the hands of his trainees. I suspect that picking on the thoroughly no-nonsense Gwen might have presented a better chance of that happening, and it does seem a bit of pointless doubling up to have both her and Inspector Banks as supporting characters, even if it’s to get round the “You’re not allowed to investigate cases involving your own relatives” rule. Which I presume is a thing.

While I’d rather have seen more of Fortier, Scott is okay as the lead, and her action scenes occasionally have slightly more impact than I expected. However, this is largely doomed by the relentless predictability of things as they unfold. There are two particularly obvious bits of foreshadowing: one involving hot tea, the other wet leaves. About the only thing which remains in question is, which one of these will actually be relevant to the ending, and which will be a red herring. I’ve no intention in spoiling all the film’s slight pleasures, so if you want to find out, you are going to have to watch this yourself.

Dir: John Murlowski
Star: Ashley Scott, David Cade, Sophie Guest, Laurie Fortier

Furie

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★★★
“Hell hath no furie…”

We’ve seen Ngo, the star here, previously on this site in Clash and The Rebel, though in both of those, she was the film’s co-star, along with Johnny Nguyen. [What I hadn’t realised, is she was also in The Last Jedi, albeit briefly, playing the sister of Rose Tico, as well as Netflix movie Bright] Here, she’s the focus of the film, which makes for an improvement from the action-heroine point of view, even if the story is rather generic.

She plays Hai Phuong, a former gangster, who had to leave Saigon after an unfortunate arson incident, and is now working as a debt-collector for a rural loan-shark. Her little daughter, Mai (Vy), dreams of them going legit, running a fish-farm, and Hai is about to pawn her precious ear-rings to realize this ambition, when Mai is snatched from a local market and taken back to Saigon. Hai naturally follows, and discovers her daughter was taken by an organ-trafficking ring. The cops have been investigating, but lead officer Luong (Nhien) hasn’t been able to get enough evidence to act against them. He’s more than happy to let Hai bust the gang wide open, along with its brutal female leader, Thanh Soi (Hoa).

It’s probably a little slicker than her previous Vietnamese vehicles, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing. The fight choreography, cinematography and editing teeter dangerously near to the Hollywood style, rather than the more “old-school” approach taken before. I prefer the latter, being more amazed by physical talent, than cinematic sleight of hand. Not that Ngo is entirely deficient in skills, it’s just a lot harder to be sure here. To be honest, Hoa probably comes over as more impressive in that area, though we don’t really see enough in terms of performance to be able to assess her skills in the acting department. But it’s interesting to see a martial arts film where the both the protagonist and lead antagonist are both women: you don’t see that often.

Despite the familiarity of the plot – virtually every review compares it to Taken, except with a mother instead of a father – the movie keeps things moving at a brisk pace, although the cop character is almost entirely superfluous, at least until the end. That’s an aspect which I felt could have been handled better, with the heroine suddenly getting a bit white-knighted, after surviving through everything to that point on her own abilities. However, it’s overall a good character arc, with Hai simply trying to do the best for her daughter, only to find that life is reluctant to allow that, and keeps putting obstacles in her way. A solid and effective enough slice of action, I just wish it had possessed more local flavour; if there was ever a case where a film can perhaps be said to be too polished, this might be it.

Dir: Lê Văn Kiệt
Star: Veronica Ngo, Cát Vy, Phan Thanh Nhiên, Trần Thanh Hoa

Forgotten Gods by S. T. Branton

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Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

Vic Stratton is a woman on a mission. She’s seeking out Rocco Durant, the New York mobster who was responsible for the deaths of her parents five years ago. With the cops unable to do much, she turns vigilante, and is finally on the brink of taking her vengeance when…Well, things get cosmically weird: specifically, “something both large and seemingly on fire blotted out the whole skyline across the river with its brightness.” She ends up fishing a man out of the river, who was carrying a glowing sword which makes fast work of Durant’s henchmen. Turns out, the man, Marcus, is a former Roman legionary: centuries ago, he became a guard in Carcerum, a realm to which a selection of unpleasant deities were banished by King Kronin.

Now, Kronin is dead, killed by his oldest ally, Lorcan, and Marcus needs to find a hero, worthy of carrying the Gladius Solis, the only weapon capable of keeping the gods in check. However, they are beginning to make their presence felt on Earth, and Vic isn’t the only person to have made a new friend following their dockside encounter. Durant has become an underling to Lorcan, and has picked up some disturbing new talents and character traits. For Lorcan is planning to put together an army of the undead, and is using Durant and his contacts to further that end, creating a “vampire factory.” Durant is vampire #1.

I enjoyed this. It doesn’t hold any surprises in terms of where the first volume ends – the cover pretty much gives that away! But the ‘odd couple’ relationship pairing of Vic and Marcus works well, and is occasionally surprisingly poignant. Vic’s original misgivings seem justified, when Marcus is unable to grasp the concept of an “actor”, but the two end up needing each other more than it initially seems. He needs her as a guide through the very different modern world. While as well as learning the art of fighting, she needs him to break opens the scar-tissue of deep cynicism, with which she has increasingly been affected since her parents were killed.

I’d call this first volume mostly set-up, and it’s only at the end where Vic comes into her own. In particular, she kicks into high gear when she has to rescue Marcus from a truly hellish situation in the vampire factory. The resulting sequence, involving a pit of vampires in production, is messy, to put it mildly. It demonstrates Vic’s take no prisoners attitude: she has had that since the beginning, and when combined with Marcus’s training and the Gladius Solis, eventually make for a powerful heroine. The journey there is entertaining though, and this was very much one I “watched” as much as read, the story playing out in my mental cinema. [The ‘gangster turned vampire’ aspect reminded me of Innocent Blood] Further volumes in the series have been marked for potential purchase.

Author: S. T. Branton
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Forgotten Gods series.