Romancing The Dead by Tate Hallaway (Book 3)

Our spunky witch with attitude is back in Book 3 of the Garnet Lacey fantasy book series. This installment focuses on Garnet’s frantic attempts to locate her fiancé, start a new coven, and avoid being killed by persons unknown.

The book opens with Garnet planning her impending wedding. Unfortunately Garnet is having a hard time coming to terms with her upcoming nuptials with Sebastian, her drop dead (no pun intended) gorgeous vampire boyfriend. It’s not so much the wedding itself or the concept of being married, it’s that Garnet doesn’t really know much about Sebastian’s life before he met her, nor does she know much about his “other life” with his ghouls, women and men who willingly let vampires bite them. Ghouls provide vampires with their much needed blood supply. Garnet has ignored this segment of Sebastian’s life but now has to face the fact that one of them could be responsible for Sebastian’s recent disappearance. That’s right, her boyfriend has gone missing. He never made it home one night and Garnet slowly begins suspecting foul play.

This brings her into contact with Sebastian’s estranged son, Matyas, who attempted to kill both Sebastian and Garnet in the previous book. Matyas blames his father for his mother’s current state of torpor; she was dying and Sebastian attempted to make her into a vampire. It didn’t work and as a result she exists somewhere between being dead and undead. In order to find Sebastian Garnet has to set aside her feelings for Matyas and request (and even more difficult, accept) his assistance. The relationship between Garnet and Matyas is occasionally strained but provides some of the scant humor sprinkled throughout the book.

I gotta tell you, this book didn’t do it for me. It was quite obvious early on which characters were involved in Sebastian’s disappearance. This took away a lot of the suspense and mystery that could have carried the plotline along to the end of the story. Unfortunately, once you knew who the bad guys were it was somewhat annoying having to wait for Garnet to play “catch up.”

The climax of the story was somewhat of a letdown as well. At less than 300 pages (with a few blank pages thrown in) this book seemed to end without really accomplishing very much. Perhaps I’ve read too many other urban fantasy books like the Rachel Morgan and Paige Winterbourne series because I kept waiting for Garnet to do some cool magical spells to defend herself and those around her. Without the prevalence of magic Garnet seemed a little too general to me, too pedestrian. Don’t get me wrong, magic use does occur in the book, it just wasn’t very exciting to me. Again this might be because I’ve recently read books where magic is more prevalent.

If you’ve read the other books in this urban fantasy series (see my review of Dead Sexy) you’ll understand why I think this one falls a little short on substance. Nonetheless I’ll probably purchase the next book in the series just to see where Tate Hallaway takes Garnet.