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Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Reign of Blood by Alexia Purdy

Reign of Blood (Reign of Blood #1)
Alexia Purdy
Pub.: April 29, 2012

Reign of Blood (Reign of Blood, #1)"Never tease anything that wants to eat you. My name is April Tate and my blood is the new gold. Vampires and hybrids have overrun my world, once vibrant with life, but now a graveyard of death shrouded in shadows. I fight to survive; I fight for my mother and brother. The journey is full of turns that I am quite unprepared for. And I'm just hoping to make it to the next Vegas sunrise..."

In a post-apocalyptic world, a viral epidemic has wiped out most of the earth’s population, leaving behind few humans but untold numbers of mutated vampires. April is a seventeen-year-old girl who lives in the remains of Las Vegas one year after the outbreak. She has become a ferocious vampire killer and after her family is abducted, she goes searching for them. What she finds is a new breed of vampire, unlike any she has seen before. Unsure of whom she can trust, she discovers that her view of the world is not as black and white as she once thought, and she's willing to bend the rules to rescue her family. But in trying to save them, she may only succeed in bringing her fragile world crashing down around her.

"Never tease anything that wants to eat you." Words to live by if you wanna survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

Besides her mother and little brother, April Tate seems to be the last human left in Las Vegas after a virus caused serious mutations worldwide, turning humans into vampires. Her family seems to be immune, and being the last ones in the city makes it easy to raid the city for supplies during the daytime. That is until the day April went off to the drugstore alone, and came back to find her mother and brother gone. She immediately suspects the vampires found a way to collect them during the daylight hours and begins a long, exhausting campaign to check every building down the strip in order to find them again. Days later she's blown up several buildings with hives, but has yet to find her family. And the nights are no easier, as a strange group of vampires begin appearing outside her hidden bunker, who almost seem intelligent. When bombing another building, things go awry and April finds herself trying to survive her own blast, only to be saved by one of the vampires that had been stalking her homestead. Dumbfounded that a vampire was able to not only speak, but willing to save her life, she returns to the vampire's homestead when told they know about the whereabouts of her missing family. April slowly learns that nothing is as it seems, including her own mortality.

Reign of Blood isn't exactly a new literally concept, and in fact is strikingly similar to The Weepers and such, but there were a few new twists to the story that kept me intrigued. I was immediately curious as to why April and her family survived. They're nothing special, and the only reason April knew how to fight was because she buried herself in fighting How-To videos and stripped the hunting stores of their weapons once the world went to crap. And she's not the only one surprised by her survival. When a secondary, more intelligent, vampire type saves her life and explains that they are a vampire-human hybrid able to walk in sunlight, they too are curious and want to run tests on April's blood to see if her DNA might hold the key to curing them. Unfortunately for her family, they're being held by a rival group for the same purpose, but they're kept as prisoners whereas April is mostly allowed to roam free at her own risk (cause not every hybrid vampire is glad she's around).

Devising a plan to save her family, April is slightly distracted by Rey, one of the leaders of the hybrids. Maybe it's cause she hasn't seen a hot guy since they all went extinct, but she can't help but feel a smidgen of interest towards him, and him to her. Some might call this insta-love, but really it's cause a lot of the vampires become imprinted on one another, and even married couples split up and go for someone new. But humans don't imprint. And if April is actually imprinting on Rey, then maybe she's not as immune to the virus as she once thought, and just perhaps, there's a more frightening reason why she's managed to survive this long in a post-apocalyptic world full of blood-sucking vampires.


Novel provided by author for honest review.

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1 comment:

krysfoss said...

Im so exciting to read this! Seems like such an interesting concept and that cover! Beautiful :)