EXHUMED by Skyla Dawn Cameron is fast, funny, and furious; at times, your
whiplash can mirror that suffered by some of the characters. I loved it. The
action and fight scenes were intense, the romance bittersweet, and it left me
wanting more.
EXHUMED is the fourth book in the Demons of Oblivion
series - the continuation of the story of Zara Lain, vampire, bounty
hunter, and assassin. While we get snippets of her history, most of this book
focuses on her attempt to assimilate Nate, her boyfriend, to life as a vampire.
She turned him into a vampire without his consent six years prior, but he has
just come out of the incubation period and is quite the savage. Nate doesn't
completely recognize Zara, and she has to figure out how to reorient him with
his new life while preventing him from killing her, keeping them both from being
killed by other supernaturals, and averting the apocalypse.
The book
moved at a fast pace, had great action scenes that could rival major motion
pictures, was even funny at times, and had some nice twists. I only had two
issues with the book, the first of which can easily be avoided by other readers.
EXHUMED is not the first book in the series and really cannot be read as a
stand-alone novel. (The cover art also does not alert the reader to this fact.)
There are just too many details that require the foreknowledge gained from the
previous books to understand the motivations of the characters and the
parameters of the paranormal world created by the book. Other than that, Zara is
worse than a sailor; she curses as if she knows no other language. While I
understand that using expletives is the norm for many people, here, it is just
downright distracting from the rest of the text. Since the book is written in
first person, all of the narration is filled with expletives, too. The reader
simply does not need that many expletives to understand that Zara is a real
bad@*#.
The romance is well done and easy to believe. Both narration and
dialogue give enough of the emotional history for the reader to easily accept
the premise that Zara and Nate were deeply in love before she turned him into a
vampire without asking. The romance is also believable in that it is sometimes
sweet and sometimes hot, but really heavy on the bittersweet. People make
mistakes and have to live with the consequences of their actions. EXHUMED does a
great job of adhering to that truism. As for the heat level, I would give this a
rating of 3 out of 5.
The ending of the book was well done. The immediate
issues in the book are resolved, but the characters still have a lot to address
in their lives. Sadly, the author's note at the end of the book indicates that
while there will be more to this series, there may not be another book focused
on Zara and Nate. I would definitely be interested in another book that gives us
the story of how things work out for these two in the future, and I will
definitely be checking out the other books in this series.
Review originally written for The Romance Reviews:
http://www.theromancereviews.com/viewbooksreview.php?bookid=6749
