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Early Review: The Trouble With Vampires by Lynsay Sands (Argeneau #29)

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The Trouble with Vampires by Lynsay Sands // VBC ReviewThe Trouble With Vampires (Argeneau #29)
Lynsay Sands
Published: April 23, 2019 (Avon)
Purchase: Book Depository or Amazon
Review source: copy provided by publisher in exchange for an honest review

Reviewed by: Amy

Rating (out of 5): 3.5 stars

Note: While this review will be spoiler free, it will reference events from the previous story arc in the series. If you missed it, check out VBC’s review of Runaway Vampire.

The last thing Santo Notte expects to find when he’s called away to investigate a possible sighting of the dreaded Dr. Dressler is to come across his life mate. Even more unexpected is the fact that she’s already familiar with Immortals.

Petronella “Pet” Stone is babysitting her nephew while her sister and brother-in-law are both out of town when she crosses paths with a group of Immortals renting the house next door. Not only is this a shocker, but it also brings up memories of a traumatic past. Knowing nothing about life mates, her feelings are further tangled up with the attraction she has for Santo.

As the investigation into the reappearance of Dr. Dressler proceeds, Santo and Pet will have to reconcile their own traumas and figure out if they can have a future.

This time around, I liked that Lynsay Sands gives us a mortal that is already familiar with the Immortal world. What I liked even better, though, was that this didn’t just make the whole life mate process go any easier for Santo as they suffer some miscommunication when they begin to learn about one another. It says a lot about how we communicate with one another, especially when trying to reconcile our lives after an incident that hasn’t necessarily left a physical scar, but a scar on one’s psyche.

Pet embodies the quote “though she be but little, she is fierce” and is a reminder that strength (of mind and body) does not rest on stature. Despite others around her wanting to keep the past buried, Pet has faced it enough that she’s able to move forward with her life and isn’t constrained by what happened.

Santo, on the other hand, being everything big and burly, exemplifying true physical strength, has kept the past buried too long (he is around 3,000 years old) and with the acknowledgement that their trauma is something they have in common, it’s clear that his past still haunts him.

While I appreciate the clear contrast between how Santo and Pet each handle their feelings, I really wanted more depth to the characters. Pet’s issues are the focus, and while we are aware of Santo’s, the conflict they inevitably cause between the pair felt more tacked onto the end in a rushed kind of way. I felt like it could have been developed a little more throughout the story.

I also found myself kind of interested with the return of Dressler who we last saw escaping in Immortal Unchained, but as anyone familiar with the series knows, oftentimes these types of story arcs develop over the course of a few books as, obviously, the standalone romance takes center stage. I wish in this case there was a more clear-cut path leading readers into the next book. There were a few things learned in The Trouble With Vampires—especially the information we learn surrounding Pet’s familiarity with Immortals—that I could see explored somewhere down the line, but with such a large cast of characters who knows when that might happen.

Sexual content: sex, references to rape

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