The Blood Books (Vicki Nelson) — (1991-1997) Now available in three omnibus editions. Publisher: Vicki Nelson is an ex-homicide cop turned private detective. Mike Celluci, Vicki's former parter, is still on the force. Henry Fitzroy is an author of bodice rippers-and a vampire. Together, the trio find themselves caught up in mysteries with a supernatural slant-from demons to werewolves and every otherworldly creature in between.
 
 
 Blood Price
Blood Price, the first of Tanya Huff's Blood Books, is about Vicki Nelson, a private investigator, and Henry Fitzroy, a five hundred year old vampire and illegitimate son of Henry VIII. Clichéd urban romance story, right? Well, there are a few things about this novel that piqued my interest and guaranteed I'll be reading the rest of The Blood Books.
In a genre that is crowded with books about vampires linked with strong female characters, a novel would need something extra to make it stand out. Huff provides that in the form of Vicki — a woman who leaves the police force when she is diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition that will possibly render her blind. Vicki is strong, obstinate, and bitter in turn. Her self-pity at times becomes a little tiring, but it’s completely understandable for someone who has seen her life turned on its head. She is irascible, spiky, and, above all, real. You can imagine going for drinks with this woman who has retained her dry sense of humour despite her circumstances. It is refreshing to have a heroine who is not all-powerful and frighteningly capable of taking on the creatures that go bump in the night. In fact, Vicki is quite the reverse: positively handicapped when out at night.
Henry Fitzroy is another well-written character, and his dynamic with Vicki is done with humour and warmth. I love that Henry is actually shorter than Vicki (thanks to being born in an earlier century) and that Vicki is a snob about the height of a man she considers dating. The little excerpts showing Henry's court life before his change are interesting, but a little lightweight.
The nature of the detecting and the crime itself was not massively interesting or tension-filled, although I did find the criminal Norman Birdwell to be amusing and abhorrent in equal measure. Also, Huff has done little to change the traditional vampire mythology in Blood Price. Sure, crosses don't affect these vamps (in fact, Henry is Catholic), but they sleep through the day and there is not a hint of sparkle. I haven’t decided whether this is good or bad — on the one hand, I like reading about traditional vampires, but on the other, I feel that Tanya Huff has the imagination and writing skills to change things up.
The relationship side of things is where Blood Price fell into clichéd romantic nonsense. Henry is drawn to Vicki despite the fact that he knows relationships with mortals will never end well. She starts to want him when his blood taking raises her lust. Blah blah blah — nothing new here! It might have been more interesting to keep this relationship on a partnership level. I preferred the rich pickings between Vicki and Mike Celluci — their arguments and bitching and angry sex was funny, a little bit sad and, again, very real. One point I will note about the sex — it was kept neatly off-screen (thank you).
Blood Price’s strength lies in Tanya Huff's characters. I like them enough that I'm looking forward to the second book in the series, Blood Trail. —Amanda Rutter
 Blood Trail
Blood Trail is the second in Tanya Huff’s Blood Books series featuring Vicki Nelson, private investigator, and Henry Fitzroy, vampire and illegitimate son of Henry VIII.
The novel opens with Vicki accepting an invitation to Henry's place to talk about a possible new case. It’s been a few months since the events of Blood Price, and the flirtation between Vicki and Henry is ramped up a notch. Their new case involves a pack of werewolves living near London, Canada, who are being picked off one by one by a talented marksman.
Like Blood Price, Blood Trail is a mixed bag. I love the relationship between Vicki and Mike, and the jealousy that both Mike and Henry feel about Vicki is real and touching. The brief sex scenes are well-written and erotic.
Huff does incredibly well showing the great outdoors from the point of view of a city girl. In fact, in all her novels, Huff is very good at describing the surroundings so that they take on a character of their own (Toronto in the first novel, and here the farm and surrounding lands that the pack lives in).
I liked the pack, and the fact that they were presented as very much other than human. These are not ordinary people who turn into wolves at the full moon. A human cannot be changed into a werewolf, but must be born as one. Daniel/Shadow is absolutely adorable! The question of alpha males, and the tension between Stuart and Henry, was excellently written. I found the twin bond a little more questionable, especially when it wandered down the path of possible incest. Sure, animals are different, but this jarred me a little.
My problem with the pack was the sheer number of werewolves. The Blood Books are fairly slim volumes compared to other urban fantasies, and Huff still manages to pack loads in. Here, this meant that most of the pack became merely names rather than characters. This wasn't helped by the fact that each werewolf has both a human name and a fur-form name as well, so that the reader is bombarded with new names.
I felt that the mystery was pretty clumsy. The deliberate misdirection was ill-done, and Mark Williams felt as though he had blundered into the wrong story — as though Huff had created her original villain, but then realized that the plot didn't fill enough pages and so introduced the callous nephew.
I also had a problem with the fact that the flashbacks to Henry's past and the excerpts from the point of view of the shooter and the main narrative all had the same voice and tone. It didn't flow naturally.
My final issue is that Vicki seemed almost sidelined (which I think is an additional problem from adding all those new characters in the pack). She didn't move on or grow as a character, which is a shame because I think her position is an interesting one. I also wondered at the fact that Vicki showed no moral dilemma about blood taking or vampires.
I did, on the other hand, find Mike's stance on bringing the killers to trial rather than going for personal vengeance a powerful one. It also highlighted effectively that Vicki had not really shared these thoughts. Is this because Vicki has left the police force? Or does Mike have a more black and white view on the world? Regardless, it certainly kept me thinking about the book long after I closed the last page, which is a good thing!
Blood Trail is definitely an average entry in the series, but still interesting enough to encourage a devoted reader to continue. —Amanda Rutter
Blood Lines
Blood Lines is the third novel in the Blood Books series. In previous novels, Tanya Huff has tackled vampires (obviously), werewolves, and demons, and in Blood Lines, she wanders into the realms of ancient Egypt and mummies.
In the slow-burn start to the book, a new sarcophagus is found by Dr. Rax, curator of the Royal Ontario Museum, and brought to Toronto. After a series of mysterious deaths, police officer Mike Celluci starts to believe that a reanimated mummy might be haunting the streets of Toronto. When he is pulled from the case, he asks Vicki to investigate on his behalf. Eventually Vicki pulls together the threads to realize that the people of Toronto are in mortal danger and time is running out for the mummy to be stopped.
I have to confess, this was my least favourite of the books so far. The plot takes a long time to get started properly — for a while it‘s too bogged down in the Egyptology — and the subplot concerning Henry and his fear of going mad because of his dreams is dull. I disliked the period in the book that Vicki spent in jail, since it had a huge effect on the pacing, and the ending was a bit of a letdown and a copout.
I didn't enjoy the characters as much this time, either. Considering he is an all-powerful immortal who walks the night, Henry is incredibly whiny and vulnerable in this book. Mike is just annoying. And Vicki seemed once more pushed to the sidelines (as I felt she was in Blood Trail). Although she features in much of the book, she just isn't growing as a character. She is merely reacting to those around her, and much of the spiky character that I enjoyed in the first book is absent. All we have now is a pushy and argumentative individual with little charm to recommend her.
And how I dislike her reactions to the two men in her life! For one thing, she is flitting between them (Mike by day and Henry by night) without a qualm or a pang of conscience. Henry declares his love for her, and she shrugs it off as a given — in fact, moans at him for even having said it. When Mike says he wants to discuss the love triangle situation they find themselves in, she considers him a pain in the ass for doing so. She is distinctly unlovable on these occasions.
I enjoyed parts of Blood Lines, and some moments were incredibly tense, but I found the overall plot less than entertaining and the relationships between the characters annoying. I'll read on to book four, but I'm definitely less enamoured with this series than I once was. —Amanda Rutter
 Blood Pact
In the first few chapters of Blood Pact, the fourth novel in the Blood Books series, Vicki Nelson receives extremely bad news concerning her mother’s death. The news gets worse when she travels to Kingston and realizes that her mother’s body is being used in an appalling series of experiments. Blood Pact is the tale of Dr. Frankenstein, brought up to date in a gruesome manner. Vicki tries frantically to find out who is behind the desecration of her mother’s corpse, ably assisted by vampire Henry Fitzroy and cop Mike Celluci. Both men love Vicki and are trying to win her heart, but all of this is put aside when the three band together against a common foe.
I had my complaints about the last book in this series, Blood Lines, feeling that it dragged a little, used a ludicrous plot and made two dimensional cardboard cut-outs of characters that had been powerful in the first couple of books. Sure, the plot of Blood Pact is no less far-fetched — dealing with an insane but brilliant scientist and a greedy university admin chief who are attempting to resurrect the dead — but the characters are richly drawn and very real. For me Mike is the standout, especially in the last third of the book when he and Vicki are racing to find Henry before it is too late. His love for her, his determination and bravery, his wry sense of humour, and eventually, his willingness to lose the woman he loves to another man in order to save her, are just tremendously written.
I won’t spoil the ending, but it is explosive and heart-rending, and leaves plenty of questions for the next book.
Tanya Huff writes with assurance and poignancy concerning the death of a loved one. It’s clear that she has experienced the sense of loss felt by Vicki, because the realism and grittiness of her reactions ring very true.
Of course, Blood Pact isn’t perfect. Huff has clear talent, but these books can be quite uneven. For instance, there is an odd, under-developed, and unnecessary subplot in which one of the walking dead starts to have feelings for his mistress.
Also, the fact that Vicki is rage-fuelled, lost in grief and obsessed with finding her mother to the point of losing her mind doesn’t make for happy reading. Blood Pact is grim and relentless, with very few moments that lighten the atmosphere. Even the humour is of the black variety. However, I would say that this isn’t a negative of the writing; in fact, Huff writes this exceptionally well. It is more a matter of personal taste. When you read as a form of escapism, it doesn’t help to have the real world thrust so spectacularly into a book about vampires and the walking dead!
Huff also repeats her characters’ tics to an annoying degree. Vicki is always pushing her glasses up her nose, and pushing the curl off of Mike’s forehead.
That said, Blood Pact is overwhelmingly creepy (in a good way), and definitely the best of the series.
—Amanda Rutter
Blood Debt
Blood Debt is the fifth and last book in the Blood Books series by Tanya Huff featuring Vicki Nelson, Henry Fitzroy and Mike Celluci. We pick up the tale as Henry finds himself haunted by a tormented ghost and realizes he needs Vicki’s help. It’s hard to review Blood Debt completely without spoiling the events at the end of Blood Pact, but I shall attempt it!
Although there is a ghost involved, the mystery itself is more mundane than those in the previous books, concerning an organization set up to profit from the harvesting of organs. Since Huff persists in signposting her villains, making identifying them extremely easy, these books are not whodunits and so Huff has to rely on the antagonists’ supernatural abilities to ramp up the tension. Here, our heroes face only human foes, which means there is less tension and ambiguity over who will win.
Instead, Huff concentrates on the tension in the relationships among the three main characters, who have been involved in a love triangle from the second book in the series. I liked the way Huff dealt with Vicki and Henry in this book; it was both heartbreakingly sad and yet hopeful at the same time.
Mike remains a fabulous character. He is by far my favourite character of the series. I love his nobility and his desire to see justice done — but within the parameters of the law. Henry describes Mike best with this:
"Henry had done what he could, but he hadn't been strong enough to finish; he needed more blood. Michael Celluci had offered his, even though he believed that it meant he'd lose everything.
In over four hundred and fifty years of living as an observer in humanity's midst, it had been the most amazing thing Henry Fitzroy had ever seen."
Mike is snarky, clever, exasperated. I love the way he deals with Vicki, both in their tender moments and in their arguments. The only thing I wish is that he would get a damn haircut so that Vicki doesn't need to constantly brush that curl of hair back off his face!
Tony comes to the fore here as well. His desire to extricate himself from Henry and his desperation to do the right thing without hurting others is admirable and written in a realistic way.
I enjoyed the snappy pacing and dialogue-heavy writing. Huff also does a fine job with descriptive passages, bringing places and situations to life with a few efficient words.
I'll make a brief comment on how dated these books sometimes feel: Tony works in a video store and spends time rewinding the tapes, and one of the characters expresses surprise at the use of a cell phone. Technology aside, though, the Blood Books stand up well to the test of thirteen years’ time. They still sound fresh and engaging. In a genre now crowded, Huff was one of the first to pair detecting with supernatural forces; and, when reading about Vicki and Henry, you can get a sense of how exciting and new the series must have seemed when first released. —Amanda Rutter |
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