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annathepiperDespite having a title like The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, there's surprisingly little actual sex. Which isn't terribly surprising. I went in expecting humor, and that's pretty much what you get with the first of Mario Acevedo's Felix Gomex novels. Sure, it's sex-related humor, but it's fairly clean all the same. And the schtick wasn't entirely unfamiliar, anyway--not when ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
solarbird owns a copy of Bimbos of the Death Sun. ;)
So, yeah. Felix Gomex is a vampire, and I give Acevedo points for giving his vamp hero an unusual and pertinent-to-current-day backstory: he's a vet of the Iraq war who accidentally kills an Iraqi girl. Horrified by this, he lets himself be turned into a vampire by way of everlasting penance. He refuses to drink human blood because it gives him flashbacks to killing the girl.
Fast forward to his post-discharge, vampiric existence. He's a private detective now, and he's called to Rocky Flats to investigate why all the women employees of the facility there have been struck with an outburst of nymphomania. At the same time, he gets to contend with the disdain of the local vamps over his refusal to touch human blood, a band of vampire hunters with your standard hate-on for vamps, a dryad who doesn't need nymphomania to be interested in him--and even hints that what he's investigating may be tied into Roswell and Area 51.
It's a pretty lightweight read, all in all. Plenty of urban fantasy these days is way more sexually explicit than this book is; what violence is here, with the exception of Felix's backstory in Iraq, is fairly comic-booky. The disparate parts of this plot are all familiar tropes, though they do coalesce nicely at the end. Points to Acevedo, too, for having the love interest be a dryad; that's one of the under-used creatures in urban fantasy, that's for sure. My only beef with the story, really, is that Felix's refusal to drink human blood is resolved too easily. The rest of it, though, is fun. Three stars.
solarbird owns a copy of Bimbos of the Death Sun. ;)So, yeah. Felix Gomex is a vampire, and I give Acevedo points for giving his vamp hero an unusual and pertinent-to-current-day backstory: he's a vet of the Iraq war who accidentally kills an Iraqi girl. Horrified by this, he lets himself be turned into a vampire by way of everlasting penance. He refuses to drink human blood because it gives him flashbacks to killing the girl.
Fast forward to his post-discharge, vampiric existence. He's a private detective now, and he's called to Rocky Flats to investigate why all the women employees of the facility there have been struck with an outburst of nymphomania. At the same time, he gets to contend with the disdain of the local vamps over his refusal to touch human blood, a band of vampire hunters with your standard hate-on for vamps, a dryad who doesn't need nymphomania to be interested in him--and even hints that what he's investigating may be tied into Roswell and Area 51.
It's a pretty lightweight read, all in all. Plenty of urban fantasy these days is way more sexually explicit than this book is; what violence is here, with the exception of Felix's backstory in Iraq, is fairly comic-booky. The disparate parts of this plot are all familiar tropes, though they do coalesce nicely at the end. Points to Acevedo, too, for having the love interest be a dryad; that's one of the under-used creatures in urban fantasy, that's for sure. My only beef with the story, really, is that Felix's refusal to drink human blood is resolved too easily. The rest of it, though, is fun. Three stars.