Eve Cassidy has been a Burlington lawyer for nineteen years.
She has been divorced twice. She has been the inter-town treaty office’s preliminary investigation counsel on two of the most difficult cases in the previous twenty-three years of regional treaty work. She has drafted three of the present amendments to article eleven over the previous nine years. She is forty-four. She is, by her own honest read at nine twenty-three on a Tuesday morning in November, very, very tired.
The Russian vampire who walks into her office at nine twenty-three on the Tuesday morning is two hundred years old.
He has been reading her preliminary investigation filings since March 2009.
He pays her a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in cash before he tells her what the case is.
The case is that the inter-town treaty’s New York regional counsel has narrowed a five-decade list of suspect turns to two names. One name is his. The other name is the person he has been protecting for ninety years. He cannot give Eve the other name. She is going to have to find the actual perpetrator without it.
Eve has eleven weeks.
The perpetrator, she learns by ten thirty that Tuesday morning, has been her case for longer than she knew. He drove her father off a road outside Glens Falls in October 1994. He has been on the wrong side of every vampire-related thing in her family’s history since the night of the third Thursday of November 1924, when his grandfather attempted to assassinate her grandfather at a council chamber meeting in a small Vermont town.
The Russian vampire of two hundred years, Aleksandr Volkov, was at the council chamber that afternoon.
He stood between them.
TAKE ME is Book Four of The Hollow Creek Vampires, a small-town paranormal romance series by C.J. Blackwood. A Burlington lawyer of forty-four. A Russian vampire of two hundred. A case spanning a hundred and one years. Two divorces in her history, one knife in his coat since 1934, three small careful private intimate scenes between them, and an extra-legal council decision at a Friday-night kitchen table that turns the question of justice into the question of who carries the knife. Cassius, Wren, Theo, Estelle, Tess, Felix, Marguerite, and Eleanor from Books 1–3 all carry forward and gather at one long deal table for the dinner that defines the series. The dark book in the series. The book the series has been building to.
Tropes: lawyer heroine · ancient Russian vampire hero · age gap (44/220) · falsely accused vampire · grumpy/grumpy · enemies-to-collaborators · the case is a hundred years old and so is he · her mother is the lawyer who keeps his secrets · morally complex decisions · the council handles by its own means · explicit, three on-page scenes · the bite she asks for on a Monday evening at six oh six · HEA.
Genre: Paranormal Romance
She has been divorced twice. She has been the inter-town treaty office’s preliminary investigation counsel on two of the most difficult cases in the previous twenty-three years of regional treaty work. She has drafted three of the present amendments to article eleven over the previous nine years. She is forty-four. She is, by her own honest read at nine twenty-three on a Tuesday morning in November, very, very tired.
The Russian vampire who walks into her office at nine twenty-three on the Tuesday morning is two hundred years old.
He has been reading her preliminary investigation filings since March 2009.
He pays her a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in cash before he tells her what the case is.
The case is that the inter-town treaty’s New York regional counsel has narrowed a five-decade list of suspect turns to two names. One name is his. The other name is the person he has been protecting for ninety years. He cannot give Eve the other name. She is going to have to find the actual perpetrator without it.
Eve has eleven weeks.
The perpetrator, she learns by ten thirty that Tuesday morning, has been her case for longer than she knew. He drove her father off a road outside Glens Falls in October 1994. He has been on the wrong side of every vampire-related thing in her family’s history since the night of the third Thursday of November 1924, when his grandfather attempted to assassinate her grandfather at a council chamber meeting in a small Vermont town.
The Russian vampire of two hundred years, Aleksandr Volkov, was at the council chamber that afternoon.
He stood between them.
TAKE ME is Book Four of The Hollow Creek Vampires, a small-town paranormal romance series by C.J. Blackwood. A Burlington lawyer of forty-four. A Russian vampire of two hundred. A case spanning a hundred and one years. Two divorces in her history, one knife in his coat since 1934, three small careful private intimate scenes between them, and an extra-legal council decision at a Friday-night kitchen table that turns the question of justice into the question of who carries the knife. Cassius, Wren, Theo, Estelle, Tess, Felix, Marguerite, and Eleanor from Books 1–3 all carry forward and gather at one long deal table for the dinner that defines the series. The dark book in the series. The book the series has been building to.
Tropes: lawyer heroine · ancient Russian vampire hero · age gap (44/220) · falsely accused vampire · grumpy/grumpy · enemies-to-collaborators · the case is a hundred years old and so is he · her mother is the lawyer who keeps his secrets · morally complex decisions · the council handles by its own means · explicit, three on-page scenes · the bite she asks for on a Monday evening at six oh six · HEA.
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Used availability for C J Blackwood's Take Me