Wait Till Your Vampire Gets Home, by Michele Bardsley

Fourth in the Broken Heart, Oklahoma series, Wait Till Your Vampire Gets Home changes gears slightly—this time, the heroine is both human and a stranger to the town and its recent… change in management, so to speak.

Some of you may remember that I am not particularly fond of the first person narrative (this and this and this and this reviews notwithstanding), but I find Libby truly delightful. Off the bat, though, I have one major complaint with the title—contrary to Because Your Vampire Said So, I really don’t see the tie between title and novel here.

Onwards with the back cover blurb:

It’s one thing to date a single father with emotional baggage… but quite another to date one who’s dead.

It’s only because of my work as a paranormal investigator that I, Libby Monroe, end up in a town like Broken Heart, Oklahoma, chasing down bizarre rumors of strange goings-on–and finding vampires, lycanthropes, and zombies. Oh, my!

I never expected to fall in lust, but sexy vampire Ralph Genessa is too irresistible. The fact that he’s the loving, sexy father of twin boys drives the nail into my coffin and wins my undying love. And you know what they say: Home is where the heart is. Only this town is being torn in two by a war between the undead, and I may be the only thing that can hold Broken Heart together.

From where I sit, it’s a testament to Ms Bardsley talent that even though we hear them through a different narrator, the voices of previous characters are easily recognizable for the most part. In fact, my only complaint in that regard is the use of the word “discombobulated” by Libby. I definitely can see Patsy using it, but not so much here.

By the way, did I mention that I like Libby a lot?

She is the only daughter of a couple of fanatic believers in the supernatural who, having heard rumours about all the crazy recent events in and around Broken Heart, have plunged head first into an investigation. Obviously, their curiosity and devotion to researching the paranormal is rewarded—even if a tad too drastically in Libby’s case.

While dragons and other various mythological creatures were introduced in the previous book, this time we learn much more, as one of the remaining few dragons manages to hide her soul inside Libby—who promptly shares some of it with Ralph—during an attack by yet another, evil dragon, and one of the Ancient vampires who refuses to acknowledge the new order of things (which was established by the events narrated in Because Your Vampire Said So).

Obviously, Libby is not exactly prepared to handle a dragon’s power—or to resist the lure of fire—which means that all sorts of shenanigans ensue. During one of such episodes, Libby almost kills, then saves, and almost kills again, one of the other vampires. This leads to yet another tangent of rather funny scenes, including her having a conversation with a computer and her musings about her sudden craving for meat.

Did I mention that she’s vegan?

The plot is twisty, implausible and campy—but then, when you have a universe with goddesses, prophecies, dragons, vampires, zombies, werewolves, etc., all tromping around small town OK together, camp would be the only way to make it work, methinks.

I cannot let go of some of the inconsistencies, though (yes, I’m anal retentive), such as where exactly were Libby’s parents, and what were they doing during most of the book? Were they in contact with Brady and his peeps or not? And what exactly will happen with the other three peeps?

I had a bit of trouble with the whirlwind pace this time around; somehow I didn’t feel the same pull in the chemistry between Ralph and Libby that I did with Patsy and Gabriel. On top of that, there were too many characters from the beginning, but near the end it seemed like new characters kept dropping out of the sky—from Brad to Ash to Stan. It bears mentioning that, not having read the first two titles, I may be wrong about these being all new characters to the series, but even then, it just felt… crowded.

I didn’t care for the name dropping—Brad Pitt, Simon Colwell, etc. While it didn’t drive me up a wall, it just separated me from the narrative for some reason, though I can’t really articulate why.

It’s the same with the multiple births—Ralph has twins and Patsy is pregnant with triplets. Of course I have no clue as to the size of the population, but within the characters already introduced, it would seem like a higher than normal incidence of multiple births, wouldn’t it?

Then there is the epilogue. Even disguised as a chapter, anything starting with “three months later…” is an epilogue in my book, and I have a hard time with nine out of ten of these. Here it was no exception, and more so because there are yet more new characters showing up in it.

However, my most serious issue with the novel is that it seems to strive to out-do the previous one in regards to scope of magic and power and the urgency of the situation. See, one of the reasons I’ve stopped reading some series—most notably Christine Feehan’s Carpathians—is the need to make the fantastic elements of each successive novel more over the top than the previous one. I hope that Ms Bardsley’s Broken Heart books do not follow that trend.

So while I liked Libby a lot, and her parents are adorable characters, and the writing voice is so appealing, what I perceive as one-upmanship was a big drawback for me.

7 out of 10

You can find it at amazon.com here and at amazon uk here.