Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Bewitching Book Tours Book Review: Blood and Whiskey

Author: Clark Hays & Kathleen McFall
Title: Blood and Whiskey
Publisher: Pumpjack Press
Publish Date: April 20, 2012
Buy: Amazon
Review Copy Provided By: Bewitching Book Tours and the author
Book Blurb: When a young homeless woman is snatched from the streets of Portland, Oregon, she has time to make one terrified call to her uncle Lenny in tiny LonePine, Wyoming. A way-off-the-grid survivalist and paranoid conspiracy theorist, Lenny turns to his best friend Tucker for help. But Tucker's got his own problems, including a vampire girlfriend.

A perpetually broke, down-on-his-luck cowboy, Tucker has fallen hard for Lizzie, a whip smart, big city girl and hotshot reporter. To everyone's surprise in LonePine (all 438 of them), she's fallen hard for him too.

Their unlikely love is central to The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Darkly Romantic Mystery when Lizzie finds out the awful truth about her heritage. Tucker, with a little help from his Dad, Lenny and an overly-sensitive cow dog named Rex, take on Lizzie's maniacal vampire father and his beautiful consort Elita. It's a blood-spattered undead apocalypse of terror and tumbleweeds.

In Blood and Whiskey, the second book in The Cowboy and Vampire Thriller Series, Tucker, Lizzie and the rest of the gang are back with a vengeance. Lizzie is pregnant, with a growing, unquenchable thirst for human blood and trouble on the horizon. The most powerful vampires from the ruling clans are headed to LonePine to test her new powers. If they find her lacking, Lizzie, her growing baby, and all of LonePine will be destroyed -- not that it would take very long.

It's an inconvenient time for Tucker to take a road trip, but sometimes friendship trumps common sense. With a duffle bag of improvised weapons, he sets out for Portland with Lenny to find the kidnapped girl. They end up in remote Plush, Oregon, where -- smack dab in the middle of the sagebrush desert -- they uncover a human blood farm run by a fearsome cowboy enemy resurrected from the Old West. His name is Henry Plummer and his sights are set on Lizzie.

As the truth about what they have uncovered dawns on Tucker and Lenny, they rush back to LonePine. The Vampire illuminati have already arrived, including Rurik, a handsome Russian vampire angling to take Tucker's place next to Lizzie.

How far will Lizzie and Tucker go to protect their unlikely love? Can a cowboy and a vampire ever hope to find happiness?

Blood and Whiskey is a story of love, loyalty, loss and sacrifice in the modern American West. With meditations on the nature of good and evil, a new cosmology for vampires -- including a meta-consciousness where vampire (and human) minds reside between deaths -- and a cast of gritty, quirky, realistic western characters, Blood and Whiskey tangles the vampire and cowboy myths into a groundbreaking new "modern gothic western" genre.


Review: I fell in love with the first book in this series, The Cowboy and the Vampire. This book is just as good, if not better than the first. I have to say though, you should read the first before diving into this one, things will make much more sense that way.

This book picks up where The Cowboy and the Vampire left off. Lizzie is pregnant and waiting to see if she has the ability to turn Adamites (humans) into vampires. It is a shame her pregnancy isn't an easy one! Clark and Kathleen have a lot of stuff up their sleeves to keep you wondering.

Humans harvested to be blood donors....A conference of vampires in LonePine...all of this equals madness and mayhem.

Clark and  Kathleen know how to keep readers interested. Let's face it there are scads of books about vampires on the market, but Lizzie and her kind of redneck friends are different. There's not a lot of glamor here and the vampires are bad ass.

The only thing that made me sad was the death of one of my favorite secondary characters at the end. I don't want to say who it was because it might spoil things. Dang it, why does everyone kill of my favorite people!!

I absolutely love the writing of Clark and Kathleen, they keep things interesting. There's enough sex to make things spicy, but it isn't a romance. I'd compare these books to Anne Rice's books. I can't wait to see what happens next!

Rating: 5 flowers


3 comments:

Kimberly @ Caffeinated Reviewer said...

I haven't read this series but your review of book two and overall excitement for the series has me adding these to my list..i mean cowboys and vampires what's not to love..:)

The Cowboy and Vampire said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
The Cowboy and Vampire said...

Oops, typo. Let's try again: Thanks so much for the great review. We're very pleased that you enjoyed it. We think our book does stand out from the other great undead books out there, and it's nice to have that confirmed! We're hard at work on book three and hope you will consider reviewing it as well.

 
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