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The Vampire’s Revenge

Raven Hart

Published 2009         336 pages

Summary (from the book jacket)

Jack McShane: Lover, killer, seducer, family man, and vampire.  In the shadows of Savannah with its hip nightspots and moss-draped oak trees, Jack is trying to save humankind from a threat it doesn’t know it faces: an explosion of the otherworldly, the weird, the wanton, and the wicked.

Tourists are heading to Savannah for St. Patrick’s Day – and Jack is racing through tunnels below the city to the edge of Hell itself to hold off a plot posed by the double-dead and demented.  But Jack must also hold off his own desire for Connie Jones, the beautiful cop he turned into a vampire slayer.  Connie, her blood running hotter than she can handle, can’t imagine the games that Jack is playing with her body and her mind, or that the other monster she falling in love with is all part of his devious plan.

Welcome to the world of Jack McShane, a blue-eyed vampire who knows how crazy things can get – once you get a little taste for blood.

The Review

The Vampire’s Revenge is the fifth book in Raven Hart’s Savannah Vampires Chronicles and this far into the series, if you are new to these books you probably want to read some of the earlier books first rather than starting with this one. In the series so far we have seen Jack and William (Jack’s vampire sire) try to avert various supernatural disasters and protect the human inhabitants of Savannah from the evil machinations of the vampires from the Old World.

It is hard to review a book written in a series without talking about the previous books in that series and so be warned that if you haven’t read The Vampire’s Betrayal (the fourth book in the savannah Vampire Chronicles) I’m about to give away a big plot spoiler for that story. If you haven’t read it and don’t want to know you might want to look away now…!

All the books in the series start with a letter from Jack and William, the story’s two narrators and protagonists, which acts as a recap to the events that have occurred so far. The Vampire’s Revenge still has the letter to start the story but this time instead of there being two letters, there is only the letter from Jack on account of William getting staked in The Vampire’s Betrayal. He is finally dead, rather than undead, and residing in hell - so he isn’t in a position to be writing any letters about it. This means that not only the recap but the narration of the whole story falls to Jack’s voice alone.

William always showed the more inhuman side of the vampire and as a character he was hard to engage with on occasion due to his alien vampire nature. While Jack his younger vampiric offspring had the compassion, humour and other human traits that William lacked.  Between the two of them they would narrate the story from their uniquely different view points.

Left to tell The Vampire’s Revenge on his own, Jack fills the narrative with his good-old-boy southern charm and humour, and this is okay - but the story telling definitely suffers from the loss of William’s cooler vampire reasoning.  The two characters previously complimented each other but in this story the fine balance between comedy and horror has been lost.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t still plenty left to entertain readers though. Without his mentor Jack manages to lurch from one disaster to the next narrowly avoiding getting staked, blown-up and fire-bombed in a very short space of time.  His love-life is probably the biggest disaster and he manages to achieve new highs and lows in his relationship with Connie at the same time as he is fighting to sort out the mess left by the double vampires who escaped hell. As usual comedy is provided by the Irregulars – the motley bunch of supernaturals that hang-out at Jack’s garage.

Fast-paced and fun, The Vampire’s Revenge rockets along at a frantic speed combining fantasy action with light-hearted comedy to good effect. A good read for both vampire fiction and fantasy fans.

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