Having various characters do occasionally stupid things just to move the plot forward doesn't do it for me. It also has somewhat of a cliffhanger ending, no doubt to ensure that the reader will buy the next book. I will buy it because yes, I want to know how the story arc works out and because I know how great Lynsay Sands vampire books usually are, but not because of this one.

Argeneau Family

1. A Quick Bite (2005)

2. Love Bites (2004)

3. Single White Vampire (2003)

4. Tall Dark and Hungry (2004)

5. A Bite to Remember (2006)

6. Bite Me If You Can (2007)

7. The Accidental Vampire (2008)

8. Vampires Are Forever (2008)

9. Vampire, Interrupted (2008)

10. The Rogue Hunter (2008)

11. The Immortal Hunter (2009)

12. The Renegade Hunter (2009)

This story picks up in rural Canada where the previous book, The Rogue Hunter, left off. Decker Argeneau Pimms is a vampire Enforcer who along with some friends is searching for Nicholas Argeneau, his cousin, who went rogue 50 years back and has recently been implicated in some local biting no-no's. They find Nicholas alright, but only because he wants them to as he needs their help to rescue two girls who have just been kidnapped by another ruthless gang of rogues.

The beginning of this story was as contrived, useless, and confusing as the bumbling of it's characters. The overall storyline got no better and during the three days that Decker and his rescued lifemate are together before the story ends, the only bright spot was when they spent the second day like bunnies. Ms. Sands can still right a love scene with the best of them. But overall this story was the flattest yet in a series that once captivated me with it's imagination and fantastic writing. While Lucerne is still my favorite vamp male ever, I'm sad to say his plethora of relatives is starting to feel monotonously repetitive.In a lesser author you might expect this but Ms.Sands has shown she is capable of reaching far above her current level of writing. Here's hoping the next installment gets better. It couldn't get much worse than this quick read.

The Series in order:

A Quick Bite

Love Bites

Single White Vampire

Tall, Dark, & Hungry

A Bite to Remember (personally where I think things started going south)

Bite Me if You Can

The Accidental Vampire

Vampires Are Forever

Vampire, Interrupted

The Rogue Hunter ( where you knew the series was in trouble...)

The Immortal Hunter

I was very disappointed with this book. I'm getting tired of having a "short story" packaged to me as a romance novel. The story was not bad, and the author did some unique things with her storyline that did a good job of not simply re-hashing the ideas from her previous stories in this series. (Yes, I've read them all, and absolutely loved some and found others to be a bit short of that mark)

That said, the story ended too abruptly, with many plot points not finished. Come on, authors, we're not buying romance novels to read serialized books. We want a nice tidy ending, clean it up and finish it. You want to put out another book, come out with a new idea. I'm tired, so tired, of picking up paperbacks and finding out what could be conveniently packaged as a very exciting story gets split up into three separate romance novels. Take out the 30+ pages of explicit sex scenes, fill it up with dialogue and plot and move the darned story along, for pete's sake! Maybe I'm just getting old. I've been reading romance since Barbara Cartland and Rosemary Rogers in the early 70s, and have seen it all. I'm getting bored with this latest machination to get more books out of one or two good ideas.

Back to this book, do I recommend it? Maybe, after the next one comes out, and you can read them back to back. Not on its own.