Must Love Fangs by Jessica Sims

Narrated by Leah Mallach

Marie Bellavance is a human, working at Midnight Liaisons, a dating agency for supernatural beings. She has a fatal genetic disease (more on this later) and when she learns that supernaturals can shrug off such ailments, she becomes obsessed with being “turned” by one kind or another in order to keep living. It is somewhat ironic then, when she chooses the vampire species to do the deed, what with them being undead and all. Her first choice was to become a shifter but a recent incident involving a Tiger shifter breaking pack rules to turn a human girl has made this an unlikely and difficult scenario. The incident has put pressure on the Alliance (of supernatural beings) which is headed up by Beau Russell. Beau’s brother, Josh, has a reputation as a bit of a manwhore (well, man-cougar-whore I guess, because he’s a shifter of the mountain cat variety). He’s very flirty and has had his eye on Marie for a while. At first, she rebuffs his advances but she gradually softens to him. Marie secretly uses Midnight Liaisons’ database to find dating candidates – something which could get her fired. When Josh discovers her plan to date vampires (although not the reason behind it), he volunteers to “help” her find a suitable vampire. Of course, Josh and Marie fall in love and into bed but the path to their HEA is hindered by Marie’s persistence in the vampire plan, Alliance politics, and her fatal disease.

I had a problem with the plot in that Marie’s disease was kind of silly*. [Editor: please see Kaetrin’s revision below.] I suppose the author chose to make one up rather than risk offense to someone suffering from an actual fatal disease and/or possibly to keep things a little light, but fatal insomnia is not terribly believable. And, it kind of didn’t make sense. I’m no medical expert but I do know that a person doesn’t function well on no sleep for mere days, let alone weeks or months and I couldn’t believe Marie was subsisting on caffeine products and still managing at work. Because the disease is her reason to date vampires (and that is the whole set up of the story), it was difficult to put it aside. I did for the most part, but I never stopped thinking it was silly.

Josh is a lot of fun as a character and Leah Mallach voiced him with a smooth Southern charm which fit his persona (cougar-ness?) to a T. She doesn’t have super deep voices in her repertoire (as far as I can tell) but she did give him a bit of a husky rasp which was pleasing to the ear and easy to differentiate.

One of the things I most appreciate about Ms. Mallach’s narration is her general narrative voice – it differs from those given to the characters. While I think this tends to work better in third person narratives rather than first person (as this story is), it means that the female characters do sound different from the main text too. I listened to the previous book in the series, Desperately Seeking Shapeshifter, which was a lot of fun, and the heroine of that story, Sara, has a light bubbly voice. She reappears in this book, just the same. Marie’s tones were a bit deeper and a little more serious (she is dying after all). Often, even favored narrators, fail to adequately differentiate the heroes and/or heroines in a multi-book series. I’m pleased that’s not the case here.

Even though the main character is dying, the book is a fairly light-hearted romp. There is lots of fun to be had if you don’t get too hooked up on the “fatal insomnia” thing and Leah Mallach delivers the story with confidence and skill.

*Editor’s Note: Kaetrin asked to make a correction to her review after discovering an inaccuracy having to do with the disease found within Must Love Fangs. We decided to keep the review intact with a note from Kaetrin below.

I have a confession to make. When I listened to the book, the disease Marie had sounded so out there to me that I assumed it was made up. I was wrong.  I happened to stumble over a reference to it today in a Centres for Disease Control document and then I Googled it to read more about it. Here’s one of the places I visited.

In fact, it is a real disease – very rare but also very real – and just horrible.  The symptoms described in the book are entirely consistent with the Wikipedia entry I read.  I apologize to the author and to the readers of this review for my mistake.  I guess that will teach me to Google any seeming oddities before making comment in the future and also to remember I’m not a doctor.  I am totally cringing now to see what I wrote.  Apologies also to anyone who has been affected by this disease – I can’t imagine my describing something so awful as “silly” was in any way helpful.

It is difficult to say how I would have graded the book had I known the disease was real and not fictional but my error did have some effect on my grade.  So I have revised the content rating to a B.  Knowing the disease was a very real threat to Marie changes the tone of the book entirely actually.  Kaetrin

Kaetrin

Narration:  B

Book Content:  B

Steam Factor:  Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence:  Fighting

Genre:  Paranormal Romance

Publisher:  Tantor Audio

Must Love Fangs was provided to AudioGals by Tantor Audio for review.