Review: Nightshades by Melissa F. Olson

Nightshades
Melissa F. Olson
Published: Jul. 19, 2016 (Tor.com)
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

Two years ago a vampire, or shade as they prefer to be called, named Ambrose wound up in the custody of the FBI. His capture confirmed the existence of shades to the world and prompted the formation of the Bureau for Paranormal Investigations or BPI, the FBI division dedicated to policing the supernatural. The Chicago BPI office was tracking a shade suspected of kidnapping several teens when all but one of the agents were slaughtered.

Alex McKenna becomes the new head of the Chicago pod and, with help from his best friend and second in command, assembles a new team to continue the investigation. To gain some insight into the shades he asks Lindy Ferdinand to join the team. She’s a shade who’s been mainstreaming, working as a translator for a brokerage firm in Cincinnati. Not only does she have inside knowledge of shades, but it turns out she has a personal connection to the one behind the abductions.

The partnership between Alex and Lindy is interesting because the society in general, and the FBI in particular, distrusts the shades. They know very little about them, having only recently confirmed their existence and having no one but Ambrose to answer questions about them. And he’s not particularly helpful. Despite that, Alex is relatively trusting and even protective of Lindy. She, meanwhile, is torn between wanting to stop the abductions and endangering her people by revealing too much. I would really like to see how their relationship develops, especially given events at the end of the story.

Olson’s vampire mythos is not entirely new, but it has a few twists to make it interesting. For example, it’s the shades’ saliva rather than their blood that heals and transforms humans. There are a few elements of the history and the timeline that I would have liked to see explained more, like when and what the Eradication was. The story is also set in the near future, though I’m not sure exactly when.

Nightshades is kind of like an episode of Criminal Minds with vampires. I’m loving it and I really hope that it will be the prequel for a series about the BPI. I also have a few of Olson’s books in my Kindle library that I haven’t read and will now be moving closer to the top of the TBR list.

Sexual content: kissing