by Amelia Schaffer

Created on: September 03, 2009   Last Updated: September 04, 2009

Blood Pact by Tanya Huff is the fourth book of the Blood Books series featuring private investigator Victoria Nelson and the romance novel author and vampire Henry Fitzroy. After three previous books (Blood Price, Blood Trail, and Blood Lines), the love triangle between Vicki, Henry, and homicide detective Mike Celluci, Vicki's former partner, has begun to grow thin. The new conflict that Huff introduces, however, is frustrating, if seemingly inevitable, and doesn't seem to fit with what we know of the characters so far.

The story revolves around Vicki Nelson's mother, Marjory Nelson, a secretary for the Life Sciences department at Queens University, whom the reader has only met through brief phone calls in the previous books. Vicki gets the news that her mother has died of heart problems, and both Mike and Henry follow her to Kingston when she leaves for the funeral.

But there is a complication: her mother's body goes missing from the funeral home. Soon they discover that Marjory Nelson's coworker, Dr. Burke, is not what she seems; she has been stealing bodies to create scientifically reanimated zombies, even to the point of creating those bodies herself to further her work.

The plot is intriguing and suspenseful, but the characters are gradually becoming less and less interesting. Henry Fitzroy is becoming more pushy than protective, hardly an attractive trait in a man no matter what your romance novels told you. With the lack of romantic chemistry, as opposed to just sex, between either Vicki and Henry or Vicki and Mike, the reader finds it difficult to root for either couple.

In the end, Huff brings in a plot point which she introduced in the first book, and one which seemed the inevitable solution to end the love triangle: the fact that vampires are territorial and will fight and kill one another if given the opportunity. If a vampire saves his lover's life by bringing her over, he loses her forever.

How will this play out for the characters? I want to give Tanya Huff credit for not ending the series entirely with such a predictable wrapping up of the love triangle, but that will depend on how the changes affect the series's final volume, Blood Debt. Introducing a vampire character whom the readers already know as a human is difficult; what kind of personality changes take place? How do the relationships suffer? The Blood Books series has been so original and exciting so far, and it would be a shame for it to end on a sour note.

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