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3.0 out of 5 stars
Showed promise, but could have been much better, Sep 28 2003
This volume contains stories by three different authors, all set in Regency England. In the first, the vampire is a lady, Anna; an actress in a travelling company owned by her own creator, Vladim. She is on a quest for revenge, but also longs to be mortal again. When she meets the descendant of the man she loathes, can revenge be defeated by love? And can a mortal love a vampire?In the second story, Stanislaus is a Transylvanian, born a vampire. In London as part of the Russian Tsar's entourage, he meets Aphrodite, a young woman who seems to attract trouble, and he is drawn to her and must protect her. But can she accept him for what he is? The best in the collection is about Stanislaus's cousin Sergio. A much older vampire, he has for over a century been searching for an ancient manuscript which will reveal to him the secret of how to become mortal again. This search becomes all the more urgent when he meets Tamsin and falls in love for the first time: he will not marry her and watch her grow old and leave him while he remains forever young. But Tamsin has a secret of her own... This is a collection of vampire romances, and therefore right up my street, I thought when I ordered it. Unlike some other reviewers, I'm not a fan of Christine Feehan or Laurel K Hamilton, so I was not looking for violence and danger; I wanted romance. However, the first story was very disappointing. Quite apart from the surprise of encountering a vampire who can go out in the daylight and who eats and drinks normally, and never drinks blood, the story simply didn't hold my interest. One star, perhaps. The second two were considerably better, although I was still taken aback by some of the variances from generally-accepted vampire writing - again, the vampires can go out during the day and eat normally. I would have also preferred both of these stories to be longer, and therefore perhaps to have been the only two in the collection, since the first was so poor. In both, the conflict between the characters was resolved far too quickly and too easily, clearly to fit the constraints of a less-than-100-page novella. Oh, and the area of London is Piccadilly, not Picadilly! wmr
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