Review: Drop Dead Gorgeous by Juliet Lyons (Bite Nights #2)

Drop Dead Gorgeous (Bite Nights #2)
Juliet Lyons
Published: Oct. 3, 2017 (Sourcebooks)
Purchase: Book Depository or Amazon
Review source: copy provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review

Reviewed by: Margaret 

Rating (out of 5): 4 stars

Note: While review will be spoiler free, it does make reference to previous books. If you haven’t started this series yet, check out VBC’s review of book 1, Dating the Undead. 

Mila has recently moved back home to London after finding out her Australian boyfriend was married. Thinking that another human will surely disappoint her, she signs up at V-Date.com, the vampire dating site. But her vampire date is pretty disappointing as well. He tries to kill her when they finish their drinks.

Fortunately, Vincent, a detective we met in the first book of the series, arrives in time to scare him off. Vincent and his colleagues are tracking a vampire serial killer who may still be targeting Mila. Since Vincent is a vampire himself, he decides he’s the only one who can protect Mila and takes her home with him.

And we all know how the forced cohabitation trope turns out, right? Vincent and Mila are an interesting couple though. He’s very philosophical and introspective, though not in a pretentious way like you might expect, while she’s all about the pop culture reference. And somehow that combination worked for me. I really enjoyed their romance.

I was a little bit surprised not to learn anything new about Lyons’s vampire mythos in this second book though. Vincent’s being a vampire is actually a very small part of the plot. It’s all about events in his past that come back to haunt them both. (Though obviously, the fact that they can come back hundreds of years later is only possible because he’s a vampire.) Still, Drop Dead Gorgeous was much better than Dating the Undead. It’s set about three years later and mentions the earlier characters, though they don’t actually appear.

One of the things that I find so interesting about this series is its unique view of vampirism. All of its vampires seem to see it as a curse and none of their love interests want to be like them. Their ultimate HEA is becoming human and having babies and what happened to Logan at the end of the first book in the series has given them hope that it might be possible. Lyons seems to be setting up Ronin, one of the ancients, as the hero of the next book and I’m curious about how he might change that perspective.

Sexual content: graphic sex