Through no fault of her own Betsy Taylor wakes up to discover she is queen of the undead with a taste for designer shoes, as if that isn’t trouble enough she finds herself saddled with consort Eric Sinclair with whom she is to rule the undead for a thousand years. To make matters worse, Betsy’s stepmother is pregnant and her father has just let it slip that she has a half sister running around somewhere.
Betsy decides to track down her half sister and with the assistance of her friends and housemates discovers Laura, a beautiful 20-year-old student who is more then happy to strike up a friendship with the vampire queen. But all is not sweetness and light with young Laura as Eric reveals. According to The Book of the Dead, Laura is the devil’s daughter and fated to conquer and rule the earth. How can a sweet innocent turn into such an unholy terror and how can Betsy prevent the catastrophe? And why has Eric’s interest so obviously swung to Laura? Is he making a power grab or just grown tired of Betsy’s nasty temper toward him? Just when Betsy thinks her life can’t sink any further into the toilet she manages to destroy the trust and threaten the lives of those closest to her, the staff at her nightclub is striking and one of the fiends refuses to stay put. Being royalty sucks!
This, the third book in Davidson’s Undead series and picks up shortly after Undead and Unemployed. It is a light, entertaining read with sassy dialog and plenty of humor thrown in for good measure. Lines like “Sinclair went through grasshoppers like there was gonna be a crème de menthe embargo” keep to tone upbeat. It’s nice to see Betsy lose a bit of her self-absorption and happily the whole shoe fetish thing has been toned down a notch or two leaving room for better story development. Many characters from previous stories make an appearance in this book but not so much that those new to the series wouldn’t be able to pick this up and enjoy it. My main complaint is Davidson’s decision to follow the example of Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris by opting to publish this as a hardcover instead of paperback. When one considers it took me only about 3 ½ hours to read this cover to cover, the price is a bit much although fans of this series are unlikely to let this deter them from snapping up a copy when it hits the bookstores.
Because of the price for the reading time, this gets 3 out of 5 stars.
Undead and Unappreciated will be published in the US July 5 and is available for pre-order via Amazon . UK readers will be able to pick it up on July 1 and again can pre-order at Amazon UK .
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