Book Review: Vampire Detective Midnight by JC Andrijeski

Vampire Detective Midnight Book 1

Vampire with a past and homicide detective, Naoko "Nick" Tanaka just got transferred to the NYPD, where he works as a "Midnight," or vampire in the employ of the human police. Like all state-registered vamps, he gets his food delivered to his door, lives in government housing, and basically can't sneeze without the U.S. government knowing about it.

Still, he's determined to play by the rules. More than anything, he just wants to be left alone, to finish out his immortality in peace... but he's barely there two weeks when things already start to go sideways.

It starts with a weird case involving inexplicable paintings that predict murders before they happen.

Between his mystery painter, a bunch of dead hybrid-humans, a conspiracy involving the richest families in New York, and a school principal who has an unsettling effect on him, Nick finds he can't get personally uninvolved with any of it.

Instead, he gets sucked in even deeper, until he's pretty sure he'll end up forcibly reprogrammed by his human masters -- assuming they don't just rip his heart out of his chest and be done with it.

VAMPIRE DETECTIVE MIDNIGHT is book #1 of a gritty, romantic new series set in a futuristic, dystopian New York, involving vampires, humans and psychics trying to rebuild their world after a devastating race war that nearly obliterated all of them.

---

My Review:

I need to figure out how to reprogram the system so that I can rate something at greater than 5/5 stars. This book had me twisted in knots trying to outthink it. I failed miserably since I didn’t see any of that coming. There’s just something about Nick that I have adored since the very first book in the Quentin Black universe I read. I’m not quite caught up on that thread, so this was a little bit of a spoiler for me. I loved this book. I really don’t know what else to say. I’m caught in my usual place: the more I loved a book, the fewer words I have about it. The characters are complex with multi-faceted motivations, and emotions that are far too real at times. The setting is a gritty, ‘1984’ feeling world that I hope never to live in, in spite of the fact that our own societies are starting to look all too much like the one where we find Nick. And now, after reading the teaser for the next book, I’m completely rabid to get my hands on it. I received a complimentary advanced copy of this book from the author.