Review: Rajmund by D.B. Reynolds

Buffalo, New York-Thundering waterfalls, great sports teams . . . and a treacherous vampire lord who is slowly losing his mind.

New York City vampire Rajmund Gregor is the undisputed master of The Big Apple. He bows to no one but his Sire, the Vampire Lord Krystof, who has ruled the Northeast for hundreds of years. But when Krystof summons Rajmund to his headquarters in Buffalo, Raj finds his master slowly descending into madness and his territory crumbling around him. 

Raj is the only one of Krystof's children strong enough to seize power, but he'll have to save his master before he can destroy him. 

Several women have gone missing, and the local police are convinced a vampire is behind it. Is Krystof so lost to reality that he's capturing and murdering human women? Is a rogue vampire moving into Krystof's territory for the kill? Or is it something far more insidious, something that could threaten the existence of vampires everywhere? 

Sarah Stratton is living a lie. Her past holds a secret she shares with no one-not even her good friend Cynthia Leighton, the West Coast vampire lord's mate. It's a secret that could destroy her carefully constructed life as a professor at a Buffalo university. It's also a secret that could save the lives of the missing women. To save them, however, she must enter Buffalo's vampire community and put herself into the care of Rajmund Gregor. 

But can she trust Raj, the dangerously seductive vampire who wants to lay claim to far more than her secrets?

My review: 

Rajmund is about to take control from his sire because he thinks the old vampire is losing his mind. He's called to help find out what's happening to missing women and if it has anything to do with the vampires. 

Sarah has terrible, horrible dreams of women who have been kidnapped and she wakes up at night scared witless and sick to her stomach most times. She isn't telling anyone about the dreams even though if someone believes her it might save their lives. 

I've now read two of the books in this series and while I liked Aden, I found both that book and this one to be filled with a lot of blood, grittiness and darkness. So much so that this book felt less like a romance and more like I was reading a Horror novel. 

I wanted to like this book, I really did. I love vampire books and throw a little romance in there and I'm all over it but this book was hard to finish. Sarah was such an unlikable character, there were moments in the book that I just wanted to smack her upside the head in the hopes it would make her see just how ridiculous she was acting. Like waiting so long before telling anyone about her secret. Seriously? Could that have gone any worst than it did? I seriously doubt it. 

Rajmund so much as said when he sees Sarah for the second time that he's a predator and planned to unwrap her and that he knew she was hiding something and he could have easily taken it from her mind, but he didn't. So why did he wait so long to take her secret from her mind when he knew she was hiding something from him. These things just don't make sense and it made reading this book really hard and finishing it even harder because I wanted to put it down and just say forget it. But I always finish the books I start, even the bad ones because I hope that they will get better as time goes on...unfortunately that just didn't happen here. 

If you're looking for plenty of hot sex scenes, you just aren't going to find them here. The sex doesn't even start until close to the end of the book and even then I found it luke warm at best. 

I give this book 2 out of 5 stars.