Although I've been on a dystopian novel kick lately, I took time out to read some urban fantasy: Some Girls Bite and Friday Night Bites, the first two books in Chloe Neill's Chicagoland Vampire series. When Merit, a doctoral student at the U of C, is attacked and almost killed by a vampire, Ethan--a less murderously-inclined vampire and the Master of Cadogan House, natch--steps in and turns Merit, thereby saving her life. Sort of. The books are mostly about the egregious amounts of sexual tension between Merit and Ethan, and Merit's "unexpected" mad vamp skillz. Oh, and some other stuff, too.
I'm a fairly discerning reader in this over-stuffed genre. I won't read just any book with a sexy, armed woman on the front. (And the books with half-dressed, long-tressed men on the covers are automatically out. Oh, yeah. I totally judge some books by their covers.) Admittedly, I picked up Some Girls Bite because the series is set in Chicago, but I stuck with them for other reasons. There are a lot of fun pop culture references--I've always been a total sucker for those. Sucker, get it?! Har har. And I really do love the Chicago aspect of them. Neill has obviously lived in Chicago for a while as she's captured the feeling of the city to a T. That's harder than it may seem, and it's a skill that we Chicagoans really appreciate. I also just like the world she's created. I like spending time there. Overall, the plotting is... okay. Neill seems to have let the plotting languish a bit for the sake of the relationships and the world building, which is not as bad as it sounds. The books do keep moving along at a nice pace. I think that unless she makes some horrible missteps in the next book, I'll keep coming back for at least the next two or three books in the series.
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