Love Bites – Lynsay Sands (Argeneau Vampire series)
Hachette Gollancz, 2010
374 pages
RRP: AU$22.99
ISBN: 9780575093812

Reviewed by Liz Grzyb

The Argeneau vampire series centres around a family of… you guessed it: vampires. Love Bites is the story of Etienne, a 300-year old vampire who is also a computer geek; incredibly hot and sexy but somehow still clumsy around women and has been celibate for thirty years. Somewhat of a study in contrasts. Etienne has managed to raise the suspicions of Pudge, another computer geek who, when his overtures of friendship and wanting to work for Etienne are spurned, decides to kill him instead.

Thus Etienne winds up in the morgue, being processed by Rachel Garrett the night coroner, not once but twice, before regenerating. Etienne manages to wipe the minds of the people who brought him in, but the second visit also brings Pudge, intent on chopping his head off to finish the job. When Rachel stops him, taking the axe blow herself, Etienne feels he has no choice but to save her life in return, by turning her into a vampire too. The twist is that in this world, vampires can only turn one person in their lifetime: their life mate. By giving up this gift to Rachel, is he damning himself to a life without love?

Of course, being a romance, you can easily see where this is going. Happily, Etienne finds Rachel eminently attractive, and vice versa. The tension between them ramps up for a while as Rachel deals with her disbelief and anger at being damned into centuries of night shift, but they manage to overcome this quite easily with some saucy love scenes. The main conflict in this story isn’t really the relationship between the two, but how they deal with the threat from the dangerous, but comically-named Pudge.

While the characterisation doesn’t really hold up to close scrutiny in places (Etienne is a perfectly romantic and thoughtful guy until he needs to be the opposite as a plot device; Rachel is supposed to be kind and loving, yet able to easily forget about her family and friends who might be a tiny bit worried about the fact that she’s been reported missing, possibly kidnapped by a dangerous gunman for a week!) the plot does give enough urgency to keep the reader intrigued and not thinking too much about logic until they’ve finished.

The next in the series, Single White Vampire also looks like a lot of fun: a male vampire paranormal romance writer at a romance convention? That’s a situation to tickle anyone’s fancy! These novels would be a great holiday read – distracting, a bit of humour, saucy and fast-paced, without expecting too much more.