Bitter Blood (The Morganville Vampries, #13)

Bitter Blood
Rachel Caine
404 pages
Released: November 6, 2012
Publisher: NAL
Source: the publisher
★★★★☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

I was very happy to see Bitter Blood in my mailbox when it arrived, since I read Black Dawn (it was my first time reading a Morganville Vampire book) in April and loved it so very much.  You may recall the epic battle of the draug in Black Dawn.  Well, in Bitter Blood the town of Morganville is starting to recover, but of course you know somethings going to come up for Claire and her friends.  It doesn't seem like they ever really get a chance to sit down and relax - which is a good thing, because the constant action in this series is what keeps it interesting!

This time around the vampires in charge are getting a little power happy - insisting every citizen of Morganville carry an ID card.  The human cards indicate their blood type whereas the vampire cards allow them one free kill a year.  The humans are trying to hold on but Claire isn't going to take this sitting down.  Meanwhile, a ghost hunting television show comes to town and manages to get in the way of everything.

I think it was the ghost hunting subplot that caught my attention the most, since I'm into those kinds of televisions shows in real life.  The crew was completely oblivious to everything around them and managed to get in the way several times.  It was a hoot to read about.

There wasn't as much action in Bitter Blood as Black Dawn, but I was still turning those pages for the personal drama in the lives of the Glass House residents.  Eve and Michael feel like they aren't getting enough privacy in their own home and then Claire and Shane have a little of their own drama towards the end of the book.  They both seem like such great couples to me, I hated to see any sort of tension in their relationships.  I'm really interested to see how those story lines continue in the next book.

I'm still platonically in love with Claire.  I think she's such a strong female lead and some of the things she said in Bitter Blood made me think she's grown a lot as a character since the first book in the series. It just reiterated to me that I need to go back and start reading this series from book one.

Four stars!  Bitter Blood is another great installment in The Morganville Vampires series and of course I was left at the end wanting more... especially when it comes to Claire and Shane.  I'm really looking forward to reading Fall of Night when it comes out this coming May.  If you haven't started this series, you absolutely must!