Abigail Gibbs: Dinner with a Vampire (The Dark Heroine, #1)
 4 stars

One moment can change your life forever...

For Violet Lee, a chance encounter on a darkened street draws her into a world beyond her wildest imaginings, a timeless place of vast elegance and immeasurable wealth – of beautiful mansions and lavish parties – where a decadent group of friends live for pleasure alone. A place from which there is no escape...no matter how hard Violet tries.

Yet all the riches in the world can’t mask the darkness that lies beneath the gilded surface, embodied in the charismatic but dangerous Kaspar Varn.

Violet and Kaspar surrender to a passion that transcends their separate worlds – but it’s a passion that comes at a price...


“Kidnapped by a vampire, death by a squid. How tragic.”

First, I must say that the book was not anything what I expected. It was much better. I've run across this book in bookstores several times in the last six months, but I wasn't very interested. It's been even in my reader for a while before I decided to finally read it. And there are couple big factors why I was "avoiding" this book; the title and the cover of this book. Personally, I'm a reader who ofter chooses book by it's cover and title. If the title and the cover aren't nice, I often don't necessarily even read the book synopsis. And I'm sure that there are many great books, that I've missed because of it. But since I use the library a lot and there's so much choise, I need some way to limit my options... So.. I think the name of this book is stupid and the cover isn't particulary interesting either. So, I would say that my expectations were not very high.

I am pleased to say that I was positively surprised. The book was much better than I imagined. I don't actually agree with the book slogan "The sexiest romance you'll read this year..", but yes, I liked the book very much and yes, there were sexiness. (But I've read a lot sexier romance this year)

I especially likes the characters in this book. Violet is not a damsel in distress (even if she kinda is), but she's strong and stubborn and spunky. She is attracted to Kaspar from the fisrt moment, but is she willing to engage in her desires? No. What about when Kasper shows some interest? Still no. Attraction and sexual tention is there, but it takes a while before Violet finally surrenders. And I think it's great. Why? Because I don't believe in love at first sight. I have been really annoyed in many, many books by the fact that the couple meets, they fall in love and week later they're married or something. WTF? It does not happen in real life. Or at leats it's really really rare. Books do not need, of course, to be realistic, but I think those "love at first sight" stuff are ofter pretty annoying.

And what about Kaspar? I loved him immediately, of course, because I'm always with the bad guys. But who doesn't love them? He is honest about who he is, and he doesn't apologise. And he doesn't chase Violet like a puppy. Of course, there's always some kind of redemption or something like that, but again, it does not happen over night or just like that. Karpar really is honest about himself.

The whole Dark Heroine thing seemed a bit vague at first, but it was revealed little by little towards the end and conveniently in small pieces so that the interest towards the book remained. You really needed to read a little bit more if you wanted to know I little bit more. Maybe it's 'cos author published this originally online one chapter at a time, so she wanted to keep readers interested. I'm still not fully decided what I think about this series, but this opening book was certainly a great start, and I really hope that the quality is as good in upcoming books too. I'm definally adding the next in my tbr-list too and I'm waiting excitedly what the future holds for this series. I think that there is major potential in this one.


(from my tbr-list 12/200)