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

Book Review: The Cowboy And The Vampire

Author: Clark Hays & Kathleen McFall
Title: The Cowboy & The Vampire
Publisher: Midnight Ink
Publish Date: Oct 8, 2010
Buy: Amazon
Review Copy Provided By: The authors
Book Blurb: Reporter Lizzie Vaughan doesn’t realize it, but she has 2,000 years of royal Vampiric blood coursing through her veins. Neither she nor Tucker, her cowboy lover, has any idea that Julius, the leader of the undead, has a diabolical plan to reign over darkness for all eternity—with Lizzie at his side.

Lizzie battles for her life—and her soul—as she and Tucker find themselves caught up in a vampire war, pursued by hordes of Julius’ maniacal, bloodthirsty followers.

Who will be left standing when the sun rises?

Review: There are a lot of vampire novels out there. More then anyone should read, but this one is one of the best. It has a unique, slightly religious twist to the vampire myth, plus it has a totally awesome cowboy.

I love the vastly different way the two leads are written and the story is told from both Lizzie and Tucker's point of views. The parts of the story written from Tucker's point of view are absolutely hysterical.

I really love the way their relationship grew, and even though everything happened pretty quickly, you saw a great loyalty between the characters.

Clark and Kathleen created some awesome vampires too. (Lizzie included) The bad guys and the not so bad vamps really rocked. They were pure evil in the way vampires should be. Julius was truly the baddest bad guy ever!

The story really flowed nicely and though it had romantic aspects there was a lot more to it than Tucker and Lizzie getting together. This book was about good and evil and its place in the world. I loved how the writers separated humans (Adamites) and Vampires.

This is definitely a must read for fans of vampire fic. Its one of the best in the genre that I have read this year.

Rating: 5 flowers