Horror Book Review Sarah Dickson Ladies Of The Night One Lily

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2005 Triskelion Publishing Spoiler alerts One of a series of books in the Ladies of the Night series. A novel about sexy female vampires running a Victorian brothel promises the reader lashings of horror, sex and violence from the outset. Sadly, while there is some terrific but rather mild erotica involved, this story has surprisingly little violence, and virtually no horror or real dramatic tension to offer. When a vampire prostitute called Constance overfeeds and kills a customer, instead of using a generally accepted rule to exchange blood and other bodily fluids to enhance his sexuality, she escapes in a frenzy and leaves the brothel keeper Lily, (short for Lilith) to face the police, and try to keep the scandal from ruining her business. Inspector Holburn, a ruthless and tenacious detective, who is even prepared to kill men himself in order to set up the vampires, handles the case. Lily’s increasingly tenuous position is made even more difficult for her when the nephew of the deceased seeks emotional and physical solace by visiting her brothel. Lily falls in love with the man, and the novel plays on how he will feel when he eventually discovers her true vampiric nature. Lily is surprisingly merciful as a vampire queen. She doesn’t wish to kill the murderous Constance, but plans instead to help her control her blood-lust. Lily is aided in this by Lyon, a French vampire lord. Dickson pays too much attention to the very vanilla sex scenes so everyone in the book is terribly nice, except Holburn who is utterly unbelievable, and the vampires have few problems going out in daylight, or flying vast distances. The Victorian London and Paris settings are well used, but the novel really needs more villainy and power struggle. Instead we have a world in which every man conveniently seems to visit a brothel. Sensual at times, but ultimately lacking in any sense of true danger or conflict for its characters. The problem is that the author doesn't want to write pure horror or a work of outright erotica so in diluting each with the other, she fails to offer much of either. Arthur Chappell