Liquid Silver Books, $5.95, ISBN 978-1-59578-649-4
Fantasy Romance, 2009
Trina M Lee’s Lyric’s Gift is more of a conventional vampire romance after the two gleefully violent romantic urban fantasies she wrote for Liquid Silver Books. Now, I know an author cannot be expected to write the same stuff all the time – and indeed, she shouldn’t – but I wish she had stayed on the same track a little longer. You see, the hero in this one isn’t just a tedious self-pitying mess, he allows his self-pity to make him do really stupid things.
Lyric Morrison is psychic. She is a burlesque dancer. At the start of the story, she missed the earlier bus after finishing a private gig, and now she’s stuck in a seedy neighborhood. I don’t know why “an aging millionaire”, the client she and her fellow dancers entertained earlier, is living in a seedy part of town but maybe this millionaire has a taste for danger. Our hero Jade Kenyan effortlessly saves her from a fellow bent on mugging her. The attraction is there, but Jade is a vampire and, you know, “THIS IS THE SKIN OF A KILLER, BELLA!” But there is no avoiding Lyric as she soon has premonitions that Jade may be in danger and seeks him out to warn him.
For the most part, Lyric’s Gift is a familiar story between an emo vampire and that human woman who is, thanks to destiny or whatever, is his soul mate. There is a predictable club full of hip and trendy vampires, with the obligatory scene of our heroine being accosted by a bad vampire and has to be rescued. And on and on. But while the whole premise is distressingly familiar, the writing is clean. The pacing could be a little faster, but the story is readable.
That is, until Jade’s self-pitying nonsense starts seeing him do stupid and even pathetic things like abandoning the heroine to danger because he is such a big weenie cry baby that he will die if he gets hurt again. He is not lovable, she deserves better than he… oh just shut up already, that pathetic twit.
Lyric’s Gift is in a way unfortunate because I have already read three stories with whiny self-pitying heroes who won’t do squat other than to mope and moan before I happen to read this. Having to deal with one more of those guys is… ugh. I hope this is not some kind of new fad in the romance genre.
