Georgia Evans

Brytewood — (2009) Publisher: While the sounds of battle echo through the sky, a lady doctor has more than enough trouble to keep her busy even in a sleepy hamlet outside London. But the threat is nearer home than Alice knows. German agents have infiltrated her beloved countryside — Nazis who can fly, read minds, and live forever. They're not just fascists. They're vampires. Alice has no time for fantasy, but when the corpses start appearing sucked dry, she'll have to accept help where she can get it. If that includes a lowly Conscientious Objector who says he's no coward though he refuses to fight, and her very own grandmother, a sane, sensible woman who insists that she's a Devonshire Pixie, so be it. Indeed, whatever it takes to defend home and country from an evil both ancient and terrifyingly modern...

Bloody Good

I'm always glad to see a vampire novel that moves away from stereotypical plots and settings. So, when I learned that Georgia Evans's Bloody Good was set in England during World War II and that its vampires were Nazi secret agents, I was immediately intrigued.

Bloody Good is at its best when depicting the struggles of ordinary country folk during the war. Through the many neighborly chats that fill these pages, the reader gets an idea of what it might have been like to deal with air raids, rationing, and the experience of either being an evacuee or having an evacuee billeted in one's home. For several of Brytewood's residents, who are secretly supernatural beings, hiding their true nature is a further challenge. Evans does a great job of showing a cozy setting in ominous times.

I also loved the scenes with Bela, a fairy who has been taken captive by Nazis and forced to use her powers to serve the Third Reich. Her struggle to reestablish communication with her family, and her clever ways of deceiving the Nazis without technically lying, are captivating. I can't wait to see more of her.

Where Bloody Good stumbles is in the pacing of two of the plot threads: the vampire-saboteur plot and the romance plot. The vampires don't really do much, and the resolution of this plotline is anticlimactic. Meanwhile, heroine Alice Doyle and hero Peter Watson fall in love at lightning speed. I didn't find it as believable as I'd have liked, especially since in the early chapters their attraction is more “told” than “shown.” Then, suddenly, they're having wild sex and talking marriage. (I believe they've known each other for a few weeks at this point.) The romance plot is prominent enough that it feels like the main plot, making the vampire stuff more of a subplot, and so it was disappointing that it developed in a way that I found unrealistic.

In addition, Bloody Good needed more copyediting. There are numerous typos, and a distracting frequency of sentences beginning with “Seemed,” which more stringent copyediting might have been able to tame.

I am, however, looking forward to Bloody Awful, which features a character who was “onscreen” just enough in Bloody Good to pique my interest. I think the Brytewood setting offers a lot of room for storytelling, and hopefully the later books will be more “plotty” now that the world-building is out of the way. —Kelly Lasiter  

Bloody Awful

Bloody Awful continues the story of Brytewood, a cozy English village that is secretly home to several supernatural beings. Brytewood's inhabitants, both human and Other, face an ongoing struggle as German bombs fall from the sky and Nazi vampires infiltrate the town itself. It's the characters that make this series compelling. I had issues with Bloody Good, but wanted to keep reading to find out what happened to the people I'd “met.”

I enjoyed Bloody Awful more than I did Bloody Good. This is partly because the copy editing is vastly better. There are a few typos and continuity errors, but overall, Bloody Awful is much more polished editing-wise and reads more smoothly as a result. Another reason I liked Bloody Awful better is that I knew what to expect. The romance would be the most prominent aspect of the plot, and it would be whirlwind. The vampires would be a little anticlimactic. The characters would continue to be lots of fun.

Bloody Awful focuses on Gloria Prewitt, who is a nurse and secretly a werefox, and her budding relationship with Andrew Barron, who runs the munitions plant on the outskirts of Brytewood. Meanwhile, another Nazi vampire has arrived with a dastardly plan and has set himself up as the town baker. Gloria and her friends must stop him before he can unleash a deadly attack on the village.

As before, the World War II setting is vividly drawn. The reader gets a feel for how people must have felt, going about their daily business but never knowing when an air raid might shatter their lives.

I still have some issues with these vampires. I like that they're honest-to-goodness bad guys rather than sexy antiheroes, but I'd like them better if they were a little more menacing. As it is, they bumble too much to be truly scary. In Bloody Awful, there's a scene where a vampire has one of the “white hats” unconscious and at his mercy, and suspects she may have vampire-slaying powers, but does he try to kill her? No, he hatches an elaborate scheme to publicly embarrass her. I think he should have spent more time reading The Evil Overlord List.

Still, this series is worth reading for its setting and characters. I've already started Bloody Right, and so far it's the best of the three. —Kelly Lasiter  

Bloody Right: It takes a village to slay a vampire!

My guess was right — Bloody Right, in fact! This is the best book in the The Brytewood Trilogy.

This time, the remaining Nazi vampires have been assigned to assassinate Winston Churchill at a party on an estate near Brytewood. The assorted pixies, dragons, elves, sprites, and humans of the village must stop them before they can do the dastardly deed.

The leading lady and man in this installment are Mary LaPrioux, a schoolteacher evacuated from Guernsey, and Gryffyth Pendragon, who has just been discharged from the army after losing his leg. I liked this romance better than the previous two, and the main reason is Gryffyth! He's by far the most interesting of the three male leads in the series. I loved him to bits!

Bloody Right also features a big development in my favorite romance in the whole series. I won't spoil it, but I'll say that it's the couple who don't actually have a book of their own, but whose slow and sweet courtship develops in the background as the three main couples do their thing.

I also thought the vampires were creepier here than they were in Bloody Good and Bloody Awful. One scene, in which Mary is accosted by a vampire, gave me chills, and not even for any supernatural reason. Anyone who has ever met a nasty, overbearing man who just won't get out of your personal space will probably have the same reaction!

I enjoyed Bloody Right. It was good to "meet" these characters again and see some loose ends tied up. I do wish a few more ends had been tied up. In particular, the plotline involving Bela is left somewhat in the air. The way it ends suggests that there's more adventure ahead for her and almost seems to hint at another book, but this is billed as a trilogy, and so it's (theoretically) finished. I suppose it's a good sign that Georgia Evans left me wanting more! —Kelly Lasiter