The Vampire’s Mail Order Bride by Kristen Painter

Narrated by B.J. Harrison

I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to review a book titled The Vampire’s Mail Order Bride – I had just been making up some outrageous book titles (similar to this) with the Gals a few weeks ago! Of course, with a campy title like this, I knew it had to be humorous, and I was banking on it being similar to Molly Harper’s paranormals.

For waitress/bartender/chef-wannabe Delaney James, it was just another day at her Manhattan restaurant job when she witnesses her boss commit Mafioso murder. In her haste to disappear, she darts into Eternamate, a mail-order-bride-and-groom matching service. Picking up a file, she decides to phone the bride and let her know the match with Hugh Ellingham is off, then grabs some clothes and her cat and takes off to Nocturne Falls, Georgia, to hide in plain sight as Annabelle, Hugh’s intended.

Hugh Ellingham is almost 400 years old – a vampire turned during The Plague by his grandmother after his parents died. She also turned his brothers, and the family lives in Nocturne Falls, Georgia, where a lot of other supernaturals live under the pretense that Halloween is celebrated all year long. See, only the supernaturals themselves know they aren’t human – the tourists all buy their cover, and flock here to bars like Howlers, owned by a werewolf (get it?). He attempted to turn his bride, Juliet, those many centuries ago but she didn’t make it through and Hugh has never forgiven himself for her death. His grandmother wants vampire babies, however, so she locates a bride via Eternamate without Hugh’s knowledge.

Of course, when Annabelle/Delaney shows up, hi-jinks ensue, because vampire’s-mail-order-bride, right? Yes, there were a fair number of not-that-subtle plot twists and turns in Nocturne Falls. Hugh is told that Annabelle already knows he’s a vampire, but Delaney does not know. In fact, she’s like the tourists – no clue at all that supernaturals walk among us, so she’s chatting it up with gargoyles and other shape-shifters, amazed at how life-like their makeup effects are. Eventually she is let in on the cover story, and then there’s a conflict and then it’s resolved. The writing wasn’t bad – I was fairly amused in the first part of the story – but it soon became just a run-of-the-mill romance with some questionable plotting that didn’t hold my interest. The paranormal world-building left a lot of questions unanswered in my mind – what was the source of the blood for vampires? And seriously – the humans of Nocturne Falls, including the women he dated, don’t know they live among witches and vampires? Unfortunately, once I started questioning the world-building, I was no longer engaged in the story.

B.J. Harrison’s performance made the book a lot more acceptable. He has a wonderful voice for narration, with over 120 titles at Audible in all genres. In fact, he honed his craft by reading the classics in podcasts, which he offers for free on his website. Harrison has a great range, giving each of the characters a completely different personality using pitch, timbre, and attitude. His female voices are done by softening the sound, placing it a little differently, rather than by engaging his inner Julia Child and going all falsetto (thank you for that, B.J.!) Bellingham and his family have British accents, which he did credibly, while many of the other supernaturals have more Southern sounds, being in Georgia and all. His pacing was natural, no oddities in the recording like out of place pickups, where the narrator corrects or adds something to the narration after recording. All in all, he raised the level of the book for me from boring to bearable.

Melinda

Narration: B+

Book Content: C

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in, but at the tame end

Violence Rating: Fighting

Genre: Paranormal Romance

Publisher: Kristen Painter