Boroughs Publishing Group, $1.99, ISBN 978-1-942886-17-4
Fantasy Romance, 2015
At 35, Stephanie Scott is broke, jobless, and in desperate need of money because her Alzheimer’s disease-stricken mother’s medical bills need to be paid.
She is also an author of a cozy mystery series whose books no longer sell as well as they used to, as her stuff is not as sexy and saucy as the bestsellers of the moment. Oh, and she’s just been dropped by her publisher.
Okay, I will bite and address the elephant in the room: I sincerely hope the heroine of Marianne Stillings’s Dead Is the New Black isn’t even a bit semi-autobiographical on the author’s part. If it is, well, I hope she is having a far better life now with her vampire beau.
Yes, a vampire. Stephanie ends up working as a housekeeper of Dr Jonathan Van Graf at Moonrise Manor.
From where I stood, the place looked like the Winchester Mystery House had collapsed onto a dilapidated English manor and been rebuilt by nearsighted Neanderthals
using the blueprint for Hogwarts.
All seems well until a film crew decide to make a documentary about how vampires and other woo-woo folks are just like you and me, and one of them turns up deservedly dead as a result. Who is the killer? One of her employer’s guests and friends, perhaps… or maybe the vampire himself? Ooh.
This one is an okay read, nothing too awful but nothing too memorable either. The problem here is that the length of the story prevents it from becoming something more fleshed out.
The paranormal elements are clearly inspired by The Addams Family in a manner devoid of subtlety, as the author has her heroine comparing this and that to the elements from the old show that serve as the inspiration. However, I feel like there are also stuff here that is inspired by the original Fright Night and those old Amicus Productions stuff. Still, nothing here feels truly fresh or fun; instead they never come alive much as the story comes to an end before they have many opportunities to do so. This also includes, sadly, Dr Jonathan himself.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter; maybe this story is meant to be about Stephanie’s personal journey back from zero to hero. Predictably enough, her experiences inspire her to write a new series in a new direction that catapult her to be the new, hot urban fantasy author in town.
However, once again the journey doesn’t feel fully developed, so the author’s own career trajectory sadly isn’t going to mirror her character’s, at least not with this thing.
Just to sum things up, this one is a perfectly acceptable, quick read, but it’s also one that is going to stick to my mind for long.
