Death Becomes Her: Forget everything you thought you knew about Vampires.

Death Becomes Her (The Kurtherian Gambit, #1) by Michael Anderle
My rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ Very good

The UnknownWorld is about to suffer change. For a thousand years, it has felt stifled by Michael’s strictures, the rules they must follow on pain of death. As the first and most powerful vampire in existence, he has the power to keep the power struggles under the radar from the rest of humanity. Unfortunately that is changing.

Someone has found the serum to make intelligent nosferatu, a type of vampire little better than blood sucking beasts who can change the power struggle significantly. Michael thought this serum safely lost in the bombing of Japan in 1945.

The third effort to overturn Michael’s decrees is about to take place, the problem is Michael is tired. After a thousand years of fighting and keeping the peace with his Family, the Unforsaken and the known supernaturals he is world weary and ready to sleep a final time.

He needs to find a way to bring another to take his place, someone with the will and desire to make a difference. He finds Bethany Anne.

The daughter of a General, she excels were others fear to go. She accepts the offer but doesn’t realize she won’t be transformed like any other vampire in history, even Michael. The problem? Even he didn’t realize exactly how he was transformed and it completely throws the understanding of vampires and why they were created out the window.

When she wakes up, nothing is going to go like she thought. The UnkownWorld is going to change, it just doesn’t know whose beat they will dance to, yet.

This is not your everyday book about vampires and werewolves. Sure they cannot stand sunshine (most of them at least). They regenerate. The are strong and fast as hell. They eat iron and shit bullets. But they are not supernatural beasts. Although most of this book reads pretty much as your everyday supernatural vampire story (a pretty good one though) there is a science fiction story lurking underneath. A story that has the promise of making this a very interesting book series.

The story is perhaps a somewhat light kick-ass style action/adventure story but I think it is a good one. I rather quickly started to like the main character a lot. She is a seriously powerful, foul mouthed, kick-ass vampire. She also surrounds herself with equally likable kick-ass characters as the story progresses. Actually, so far, there has been very few characters that I did not like and the ones that were not supposed to be likable, well let us just say that they are either only hinted at and not really presented … yet or they quickly becomes extras in red t-shirts when Bethany Anne gets pissed off with them.

The story? Well it is really difficult to say much about it without revealing to much. This is the first book in the series and there is of course a lot of introduction and world building going on. As I wrote above it shows quite a lot of promise of becoming a great story arc.

I guess I have to say something about the language used. The author is dead on when he states that Bethany Anne has nothing against cussing, only uninspired cussing. I guess that is one of the reasons that I like Bethany Anne. If you care more about which words that are used and not so much about the story then this is not a book for you. Personally I do not care if the author uses words like “fuckface” or whatever as long as it is not done to cover up sloppy writing and in this book it is not as far as I am concerned.

I have already read the second book in the series and started on the third one and I am pretty much hooked on Bethany Anne & Co.