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Blood On Silk

Marie Treanor

Published 2010             316 pages

Summary (from the book jacket)

Scottish academic Elizabeth Silk is spending the summer in Romania researching historical superstitions for her PhD. While she is tracing local folktales, one subject in particular sparks her imagination. His name is Saloman, legend's most powerful vampire, a seductive prince staked centuries ago. Now, in the ruins of a castle crypt, Elizabeth discovers the legends are real. Her blood has awakened him. Her innocence has aroused him. But Elizabeth unleashes more than Saloman's hunger.

An army of vampire hunters has amassed to send Saloman back to hell. Sworn to help - yet fearing Saloman's deadly blood lust - Elizabeth seeks to entrap him, offering her body as bait. But something stronger than dread, more powerful than revenge, is uniting Elizabeth to her prey. Caught between desire and rage, Elizabeth must decide where her loyalties lie… and what the limits are to a yearning she can no longer control.

The Review

Blood On Silk is the first novel in Marie Treanor’s new Awakened by Blood paranormal romance series. Marie Treanor is an established author of erotic romances, with many Ellora’s Cave, Samhain Publishing and Changeling Press eBook titles to her name. In Blood On Silk she delivers plenty of sexy romance as her heroine, Scottish academic Elizabeth Silk, gets drawn under the seductive spell of Saloman, an ancient vampire who wants her body and her blood…

On paper this book sounds and looks (great cover!) like a perfect example of vampire romance. In romance terms what’s not to like about a dangerous vampire hero to whom the heroine is overwhelmingly attracted, even though he promises her death – the opportunities for sexy thrills and relationship drama are endless! While the book gets off to a good start in the scenes where the naïve Elizabeth gets directed towards the resting place of the most powerful vampire in Romanian history (Saloman not Dracula) and ends up accidentally raising him from his staked dormant state, once the two characters actually have to interact as romance protagonists the whole story for me just started to loose its believability and its momentum.

Initially I liked Elizabeth’s self-depreciating character, I was especially amused by her rueful speculation that she might have accidentally fallen into the plot of an old Hammer Horror movie because the method of reviving Saloman was straight out of the 1966 Hammer classic “Dracula: Prince of Darkness” – and I was having exactly the same thought myself… As the storyline progressed I found her character’s increasingly silly behaviour hard to believe and subsequently impossible to identify with – leading me to quickly loose interest in her fate.

Saloman is an altogether more complex character and his complexities add to his character’s credibility. The author eschewed making her vampire hero a nice guy with fangs (as is popular in so many of today’s vampire romances) and has gone for the more old-fashioned approach of making him a potentially murderous evil monster with sexy vampire mojo to make him irresistible to the ladies. This is always a difficult combination to pull off but for the most part Saloman’s character intrigues with a boyish joyfulness that’s hard to resist, even while he’s plotting to take over the world. There are faint echoes of Anne Rice’s Lestat in Saloman, his delight in the modern world he has awakened to, his love of rock music and his self-confidence, all of which make him a great vampire character but not exactly ideal boyfriend material.

After losing my connection with the romance part of the story and failing to find interest in the fairly incredible vampire hunter parts of the plot, I considered giving up on finishing Blood On Silk but curiosity about Saloman, and what he’d do next, kept me reading on. Ultimately patience is rewarded when the book’s pace picks up for its grand finale – the showdown between the vampires, vampire hunters and Saloman. The epilogue sets the scene for the series’ next instalment (Blood Sin) and kindles interest in Saloman’s next intrigue…

There is little new in Blood On Silk so long time paranormal romance readers may find the story to be a fairly average reworking of a long established popular genre plotline. However, for readers who can’t get enough of that particular genre plotline and those just discovering vampire romance there is no reason not to enjoy this tale of dark desire, danger, vampires and revenge.

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