Series: Vampire Queen – Book 2
Author: Joey W. Hill
No of Pages: 370
Release Date: 5 February 2008
Full Servant. With his new title, Jacob must now attend to Lady Lyssa’s every need, venturing into a world of passion darker than he’s ever known. His time as a vampire hunter certainly hadn’t prepared him to embrace a world where humans are sexual commodities, but he adapted. Now he finds the integrity of his soul challenges as he serves his Mistress’s needs as fully as he services her desires.
As much as Jacob loves her, other servants wan against giving her his soul. Everyone knows that vampires have no regard for humans, so why would a vampiress bother treating a mere sex toy with respect? But Jacob knows a human servant is far more than that. His Mistress needs a warrior, a friend and a lover – a man who will serve her in all ways, even if he has to betray the priceless treasure of her love…
My Thoughts:
The Mark of the Vampire Queen was a very hard one for me to finish, purely because it bored me.
Jacob is now a full servant of the vampire queen Lyssa. With this title comes the knowledge that Lyssa is very sick and dying, and now, because of his new stature, so will he die along with her.
This pains the pair of them as in their own way, they love each other, being soul mates throughout Lyssa’s incomparably long life and Jacob through his various incarnations, to have found each other in this capacity Jacob wants to hold on to as her for as long as he can.
I will be quite frank and say that this book bored me literally to sleep. There was far too much detail wrapped up in politics and medieval fairs that I had to force myself to finish just to have the pleasure of writing this review. The politics interest me, but the way they were written in reminding me of watching Parliament Time on the ABC, a lot of people talking quietly for two hours and once every three months having a raving blue with each other that can be quite entertaining.
I originally picked up this series because I read an excerpt of book five, Vampire Mistress, and thought it intriguing. It might still be, it’s just a shame that I will not get to it because of the quality of the first two books.
In hindsight I remember the first book being relatively slow, to the point of having to force myself through it as well. There just isn’t enough driving this story for me to enjoy it. Sure you have a problem in the form of Lyssa’s impending doom and the effect it will have on Jacob, you also have the likes of Carnal trying to upset the order Lyssa has been trying to build between vampires and humans for the last thousand years.
Yet when it’s put on paper in the way that Hill writes it, it just drags on and on. In the end I was marking chapter ends so I felt a small victory each time I reached one.
The sex was hot in this series overall, I will admit that, some of the scenes Hill came up with were especially well written, but there just wasn’t enough built around those scenes for me to remotely enjoy this story at all.
The Vampire Queen's Servant
A Vampire's Claim
Beloved Vampire
Vampire Mistress
Vampire Trinity
Vampire's Keeper
