Normally, when I crack open the cover of a Christine Feehan book I’m hooked, reluctant to put it down until I get to the final word.  For some reason this one hasn’t grabbed me like that.  Instead of immediately falling in love with the characters, I’m sadly disconnected from them in this book and I’m not exactly sure why.  Is the idea of a hero that truly is an animal too much to take?  Am I finding the heroine a little too human and thus wimpy? I’m not exactly sure. Even trying to picture Jake Bannaconni looking like my beloved Ben has done nothing to endear him to me.

Now it’s entirely possible that by the time I reach the end of the book I’ll be wanting a ‘Leopard’ man of my very own. I mean, The Lord of the Rings started so slow I almost stopped reading it and now it’s my favorite book of all time.  But right now I’m not impressed with the cold, calculating hero who spends his nights as a big cat or the quiet, sweet widow of a heroine.

In fact, I’m finding myself tempted to put Burning Wild aside to re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince before the movie releases.  And it doesn’t even have sex scenes.

My personal favorites are the Carpathian series by Christine Feehan.  I’ve been enthralled off and on by Ms. Feehan’s ongoing sagas of dashing and doomed Carpathian males and their sexy and sultry female saviors.  The Dark Series introduced me to the ‘good’ vampires, the Carpathians, who were doomed to either become evil vampires preying on humans or destroy themselves unless they find their soul mate.  The one true love that completes them and saves them from death, or a fate worse than death.

Be warned, these are books for adults, not for the teen or preteen market that Jacob and Edward are aimed at.  These are definitely in the genre that my grandmother used to call ‘trashy romances’.  It’s escapism at it’s best. Strong heroes, perfect heroines and yes, lots of hot sex scenes.  I remember first getting my hands on “Sweet, Savage Love” in my late teens.  Even a steady diet of Harlequin Romances hadn’t prepared me for the sex scenes in that book.

Ms. Feehan’s books deliciously deliver lots of hot, steamy vampire sex. Which is probably why I’m hooked on them.

What is it about our love affair with vampires anyway?  I mean, think about it.  Would you really want to fall in love with an undead, blood-sucking monster?  I blame Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or more specifically, Angel and Spike, for our current romantic infatuation with loving the poor, misunderstood blood suckers.  Sure, I know that books and movies had vampire love stories before the whole Buffy and Angel thing. But Angel, the vampire with a soul, tortured by his past as Angelus, made it easy to fall for him didn’t it?  And when he moved on to Los Angeles, the fair-haired, torn between good and evil Spike made us want to believe that vampires could change their spots, now didn’t he?  And to make things even more appealing, both of them were extremely hot, even when they ‘vamped’ out.

Now the ‘trying to be good’ vampire is the latest literary and entertainment industry fad.  Teenaged girls and the Cullen family have made it cool to lust over vampires (and werewolves, but we’ll touch on that in another post at a later date.)  I guess I’m just a trendsetter, because I was lusting after vampires…or rather, Carpathians, long before sparkly skinned Edward hit the bookshelves.

Trust me, if you’re an adult that liked the Twilight series, try the Dark Series.  You can thank me later.

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Christine Feehan has branched out in the paranormal romance genre to include several more series which I am just starting to explore.  The Drake Sisters (magic), The Ghostwalkers (paranormal powers) and The Leopard Series (shapeshifters).  In the past few months I’ve read two of the Ghostwalker Series and am currently reading Burning Wild, my first foray into the Leopard Series.  Stay tuned for my thoughts and opinions…