A review by katiehicks
Blue Twilight by Maggie Shayne

2.0

So, some background on this one (and also this is going to be a long one, sorry). I was gifted this book in 2008- I was 15 and deep in my (first) Twilight phase, and my friend thought this would be something I was into, knowing nothing about it except that it was about vampires. I started reading it, but only got through the prologue before I had to stop- I was still very new to romance and really wasn’t prepared for ~spiciness~ so the book went back on my TBR shelf and has lived there ever since.

I finally picked it up for a readathon because it actually fulfilled multiple prompts (read a book with blue on the cover, and read a book that’s been on your TBR for far too long) and it also fit the spooky season. I read a bit more about it and found out it was actually the 11th book in a series, but went ahead and read it anyway (this turned out not to really matter that much but more on that later). When I first started this book, I was prepared to think of it as a fun, cheesy book that I wouldn’t love but wouldn’t hate, either. The author does a pretty thorough job of recapping previous books- it's pretty awkward and done through stilted, unnatural dialogue, but it did the job. I really enjoyed the female friendship in this story, and was really looking forward to seeing more of Max and Stormy. Honestly, a paranormal series with two gal pal detectives solving spooky crimes seemed like the perfect thing for me (my high school friend was correct, and my tastes have not changed lol). I just wanted a fun girl-boss vampire detective story, but what I got was an immature 26-year-old trying to bone an old man who is somehow still virile enough to FIGHT DRACULA.

As may be obvious at this point, my biggest problem with this book was Lou and Max’s relationship (I also didn’t really love Lou in general, but that’s mostly because the grizzled, no-nonsense middle aged ex-cop who is inexplicably “a worthy opponent” for LITERAL DRACULA is not a character archetype I enjoy). To be fair, Lou isn’t really an old man- he’s 44 and she’s 26, but they met when she was a teenager because he was friends with her mom, which is extremely weird (they separate for a while and don’t reconnect until Max is in her late 20s, but she says she has had a crush on him since they met so it's not grooming, but it is pretty icky). I don’t love 20-year age gap relationships at the best of times, but the way they treated each other was horrible. Essentially, Max violates Lou’s expressed boundaries every chance she gets, flirts with him even though it clearly makes him uncomfortable, and eventually traps him in a bathroom to coerce him into having sex with her. Lou, on the other hand, truly believes that it is just “harmless flirting” and that she doesn’t really mean it because he SEES HER AS A KID who doesn’t fully understand the consequences of her actions. He is also pretty condescending- making it very clear that he thinks of her as a kid (even though she’s 26). But instead of firmly putting a stop to the flirting or, you know, leaving her alone completely until she takes the hint, he just ignores it and pretends he’s not secretly into her. May I present to you, one of the worst things I have ever had to read with my human eyes:

“God, why couldn’t she lay off him with the constant flirting and teasing? He was human. He was not a gelding. He was a red-blooded man, and he could only take so much… Max glanced at Lou, and he got the distinct feeling he’d just had a narrow escape- he couldn’t be exactly sure what from. More of her teasing, more than likely. Sure as hell couldn’t have been anything more. But damn, if he ever slipped up- lost the iron grip he had on his self-control… Showed her I’m not a gelding after all…”

YOU'RE A GROWN MAN. YOU’RE FORTY FOUR YEARS OLD. I get what the author was going for- Lou just assumes that Max is teasing him because he doesn’t see himself as a desirable man and can’t seriously entertain the thought that a gorgeous 26-year-old is into him, and Max is just trying to get him to see himself as she sees him- (though later on we find out this was all just a ruse and he did actually know she was serious, and he’s actually just a good old-fashioned commitment-phobe) I just hated the way they treated each other and talked about each other and I’m not a big fan of relationships where one person has to wear the other one down. Beyond their age gap, Lou has expressed that after his divorce, he is not interested in another serious, long-term relationship and that he respects their friendship too much for a purely physical relationship, so he tells her in no uncertain terms that he just wants to be friends- an expressed boundary that Max repeatedly ignores because she is sure that he doesn’t actually mean it and will change his mind. After telling her, again in no uncertain terms, to stop with the flirty behavior, Max decides that actually him saying that implies that she’s starting to get to him and she should flirt even more. 

This culminates in her following him into a bathroom, demanding a reason why they shouldn’t have sex, and when he can’t give her an answer, she just… starts? And takes “he didn’t pull free or run away” as a sign of consent? I mean, I know this book was written in 2006 and we were still a decade away from serious talks about enthusiastic consent, but all I’m saying is starting your ~spicy~ scene with the line “smiling, nearly drunk with the power she felt surging through her- the knowledge that he couldn’t say no to her, even if he wanted to- she dropped to her knees, shoving his jeans down as she went” is not going to age well. I also get that just because this would be a problematic relationship in real life it shouldn’t affect my enjoyment- I understand that this is a fantasy, I guess I’m just saying that neither a man 20 years older than me who’s self esteem is so low that I have to convince him to date me while he condescendingly tells me how I feel, nor a woman 20 years younger than me who keeps embarrassingly flirting with me after I’ve told her multiple times to stop is my personal fantasy.

Anyway, I didn’t like it but I’ll stop talking about it. I mentioned before that this was the 11th book in a series but that it didn’t really matter because there was plenty of recap. I also realized later that this is essentially an anthology series, and that this is the only book in which Max is the MC. It is part of an arc, but is either the second book in a trilogy or the 4th book in a 5-book series, depending on how you break them down. Either way, this book ends on a pretty big cliffhanger, which I only want to talk about because it involves something that made me super uncomfortable, so spoilers ahead.

The prologue of this book is a scene in which the vampire antagonist sexually assaults a woman. It's pretty jarring, but nothing I couldn’t handle. The villain of the story being a bad guy who doesn’t understand consent is not necessarily a bad thing- it is actually pretty in-line with what makes vampires so horrific (especially since we learn later that he wipes their memories, leaving them terrified, violated, and confused). As the scene goes on, though, the narration makes it VERY clear that he does not *technically* have sex with her, and also makes it very clear that the vampire is only sexually assaulting his victims for their benefit- like he is ensuring that they only feel pleasure and aren’t afraid… because, apparently he can hypnotize them to think he is having sex with them, but he can’t just… turn off their fear? Again, at the time I assumed it would be a mark of his villainy- it is extremely gross that he justifies his feeding on women without their consent by essentially saying “they get something out of it too” -like being sexually assaulted by him is a consolation prize. As the book goes on, we start to get more POV scenes from the vampire, and we keep getting it reinforced over and over again that he feels bad about the things he is doing (like kidnapping women, sexually assaulting them, feeding from them without their consent, and then wiping their memories) not to mention a scene where he very nobly refuses to sexually assault a 17-year-old girl and becomes enraged at his servant for thinking he would ever assault A CHILD, because sexually assaulting 20-year old women is fine, but someone 3 years younger is just a bridge too far.

By the middle of the book, I started to get very suspicious that there was going to be some sort of redemption arc for the vampire, and that he was going to end up as Stormy’s “morally gray” romantic interest.  Puke puke puke a thousand times until I turn inside out. I mean, they even go visit some of his previous victims, who talk about the nightmares they have experienced, and the trauma (one of them said she never goes outside at night anymore and another is in therapy because of the experience) so surely not, right? Surely they understand how fundamentally evil this guy is, right? RIGHT? And then we come to the cliffhanger ending and the reason I have difficulty judging this book on its own without having read the whole arc. 

The vampire (who at this point we’ve learned is literally Dracula and that just made me laugh so much) kidnaps Stormy in order to figure out definitively whether or not she’s possessed by the spirit of his former lover (God I love paranormal stories so much) and Stormy is… into it? Reading the synopsis of the next book, it seems pretty clear that Vlad is the romantic interest of the next book, and that it follows a love triangle between him and the 2 souls currently inhabiting Stormy’s body (which is obviously hilarious but I feel like I can’t really enjoy it because of how evil Dracula is and how this story would necessitate his redemption arc). BUT since his redemption arc is seemingly entirely in the next book, I can’t judge it and have to take this book on its own, which would mean that it is ruined by its final lines, which are the first real hints that he won’t ultimately be a villain. Presumably, he also won’t be doing the same horrible things in the next book, so his crimes and his redemption arc are separated into two books which I have complicated feelings about. Anyway, I know I’ve already written way too much about this but I (clearly) have a lot of thoughts about it.

FINALLY: Despite all the problematic relationships and bad characters, perhaps the worst sin of this book is that so much of it is boring. The “mystery” is not suspenseful at all because we already know most of it, so any time spent investigating whether or not there’s a vampire in town felt like a huge waste of time. Overall, I think this book is at least 100 pages too long. I wish this book had been more campy- I think I would have enjoyed it more if it was in the vein of Ice Planet Barbarians which seems at least more self-aware and was so quickly paced and short that I finished it in one day. 

TLDR: I’m obviously keeping this book forever as a treasured memento of high school me, but I wish it focused more on the female characters and wasn’t so full of garbage men and bad relationships.