About this book: 
Blaze Knight has been through hell and back, but the nightmares aren’t over yet.
Five years after Blaze was maimed by Cyrus Chimola, a powerful vampire with a penchant for torture, he’s still trying to pick up the pieces of his shattered life. As a genetically engineered mercenary with the ability to bend fire to his will and to see in infrared, Blaze’s mission is to protect what’s left of humanity. When Chimola and his crew return to the Bronx gunning for Blaze’s blood, Blaze is forced to face the demons of his past. Hell-bent on revenge, he seeks the help of Valerie Medeiros, an NYPD detective who manages to steal his heart and save his life in more ways than one.
Motivated by her sister’s gruesome death, Valerie has made it her life’s goal to bury every vampire in the ground where they belong. When she brings in Blaze Knight for suspected murder, she discovers he’s not only innocent, he isn’t a man at all-he’s a half-vampire hybrid working with a band of brothers for the U.S. military. Valerie has a hard time trusting anything with fangs, yet she quickly falls headlong into Blaze’s life, a life full of darkness and horror she can’t even begin to fathom. The bodies are stacking up, but Valerie can’t seem to let go of this hybrid, a beautiful monster filled with pain, rage, and passion unlike anything she’s ever known.
In a world where the line between good and evil is blurred, Blaze and Valerie will find danger at every turn, risking everything they’ve come to know and love, including one another.
Release Date: 19th August, 2015.
What I think?
So, funny story. Somewhere around the end of March I think, I got this email from a writer I had completely never heard of (I don’t obviously claim to have read everyone, but none of my friends had either, so unheard of in that sense), and it was a review request. I was kinda busy with exams at that time, so I told her that I can review her book if she gave me till 5th April. She even emailed me the copies, but they got buried under other emails, and then, in a classic idiot fashion, I totally forgot about her. Three days ago, when I was cleaning my inbox I found her emails, and felt so guilty, I basically emailed her apologizing, and promptly began reading her book, with not much expectations.
And there goes life, hammering the lesson “DO NOT JUDGE THE BOOK BY IT’S FUCKING COVER!”
No shit life. No shit. Usually, I say that above line for books that had a really good cover, and an amazing blurb, and that just calls to me, but then the writing/plot/characters is/are disappointing, and I’m in a generally shitty mood.
But this book! Oh oh oh this book threw me in for a loop there, because.. well, you can already guess where I’m going with this, can’t you?
This book was really really good. And no, it’s not my guilty conscience saying that, I think we can all agree I can be a bitch about both- a book I got for free, or if I bought it on my own. So yeah, when I say this was good, it was genuinely amazing.
It has been a really long time since I read a good vampire book. JR Ward used to be my go-to author when I wanted to read a good vampire series (because let’s accept it, Black Dagger Brotherhood was really fucking badass, at least the first 11 books), but then even she has disappointed me with the last two. So I had a huge gaping hole in my reading life that needed to be filled. Desperately. (And no, I’m not gonna read fucking Twilight!)
Enter Linda. (Yes, I’m using her first name, because we’re friends now, and that was my guilty conscience beating me).
The first book in a series is always an important one- perhaps the most important one, especially in the fantasy/sci-fi genre- because this book not only carries the burden of telling an amazing story, and capturing the readers base, but also the added burden of world building. And that is where most books fail.
But Releasing the Demons did a brilliant job with building the perfect world where vampires lived alongside humans.
First I want you to imagine what would happen if the world discovered that there were vampires living in it. OK, well the first thing that would happen is stupid teenage girls would turn into a mob and try and tackle them looking for their sparkly soulmates. But think after that. After everyone realizes that vampires are not boyfriend material, unless you wanna be a human mantis. That they are indeed the most dangerous predators on the planet, and as humans we would be equivalent to cattle to them.
Does that sound logical to you? Because it sure as hell does to me.
Releasing the Demons is based in a dystopian world, where the vampires and humans are having an existential war. Where losing would mean that the entire human race would become a cattle, only existing to fulfill the hunger of the vampires. In that world, everyone is a target, and the police are no longer trained to fight human crime, but they are trained to fight, you guessed it- leeches (vampires).
Valerie Madeiros is an NYPD detective, who had dedicated her entire life to hunting vampires after her 8 year old sister had been ruthlessly murdered. Life is pretty black and white for her. All vampires are bad, and anyone fighting them is on their side. Until she comes across a case- a brutal case, where a young 24 year old woman had been killed by the vampires and then her body set on fire, discovered only after it had already been half burnt.
Enter Blaze Knight.
The perfect perpetrator. He fit all the descriptions given by the witnesses- huge, muscular, drove an expensive car, and his entire body was full of tattoos. Except, what about the vampire thing? He had walked out of her house in the broad daylight, and vampires couldn’t walk in the sun. Could they?
5 years ago, Blaze had been captured by a sadistic vampire- Cyrus, and had been held captive for 7 months, where he had been tortured, raped, and had basically been turned into a monster. Even 5 years later, he lived with the scars and the guilt from his time in captivity. As a hybrid, or dhampir (to the Vampire Academy fans), or a half-human half-vampire, that was the part of the Order of Senery (made up of 5 other Knight brothers), he had been conceived to destroy the entire race of leeches. But he was not just a mere hybrid. He had a little more powers of his own. Aka, he was a pyrokinetic, that is, he could create fire from his fingers (which sounds so bloody cool!), and he saw in infrared, instead of you know.. normal colors (which if I’m honest, I’m kind of jealous of. I mean what the hell! That is the single most coolest thing ever!). But he paid a hefty price for his gifts- he never saw colors (because yeah, that does sound kind of sad), and his hands had been ruined, because his own fire destroyed his nerves.
Blaze was obviously not our killer, so the killer was out there. As was the leech that had captured Blazed years ago. And now, he’s come to collect.
Now see this is where the story gets interesting, because usually, after the MCs meet, the circumstances that brought them together gets promptly forgotten, and it’s a love story from there on. But Rose stuck to the plot, and instead of making it all about the romance, she made it about the thriller.
As a couple, Val and Blaze were amazing. I really got their chemistry, and the development of their relationship, if a little too fast paced, never made you feel that. I mean it. I think they knew each other for 3 days at most before they fell in love with, but the writing is so detailed, that it doesn’t feel like just 3 days. I had to literally count the number of sunrises to realize that it was just a couple of days. So I think that should tell you something eh?
I really enjoyed this book to be honest. It had been a long long time since I read something so wholesome. Linda’s writing was brilliant (I might be biased because of the science talk because I’m a total nerd like that, but seriously). She gave you a scientific reason for almost all the things that happened in the book, which is a fresh breath of air from the usual magic explanation. After I finished the book, I was begging for more, so instead of reviewing it, I did the most logical thing- I just started reading the next one lol, and oh-mah-gawd that one is sooo good! I’ll have the review up sometime tomorrow, and try and keep the ranting in check. But check this book out. If you are looking for a great series (and I can already tell it is going to be one), I really suggest this.
And let me end with this, for all the science nerdsโ
โGene therapy uses vectors, usually retroviruses, to integrate foreign DNA into genes. Since a vampire breaks down blood for nutrients, maybe weโre still carrying these vectors in our blood. They must be reactivated somehow during metabolism, possibly transduced by a signalโโ
โGet this bookโ
About this author:
โBooks in this seriesโ
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