Review: Vampire Meltdown by Storm Savage

You know those heroines who manifest their feisty independence and strength by refusing all reasonable offers of help, running away from safety into dangerous situations, unnecessarily endangering herself and others and chafing against the possessive men she desperately wants to submit to? Yep. Zoe is one of those. Combine this with an incoherent, inconsistent, undeveloped but somehow very convoluted plot and Zoe's possessive Biker Club 'mates' and I'm sure it won't surprise you that I didn't enjoy this much.

We meet Zoe when she's lost her memory and is stripping for a living. She doesn't know her name, have an address, or any money, and she's been on the run for a couple of weeks, but minor issues like that apparently don't matter to strip clubs. (Really? they'd get closed down pretty quickly were that the case. But then, it's about to get more crazy, so I shouldn't be complaining.) She doesn't know what is going on, is having hallucinations, and the reader doesn't know much more than she does. The hallucinations happen is snippets while she's grinding away to the music and everyone is absolutely crazy about her. She's a vampire Mary Sue.

Anyhow, Zoe has two biker club stalkers who are after her mates who are so worried about her, they're hanging around on their bikes, not looking for her in obvious places like her old stomping grounds, which is co-incidentally, where she is. Zoe discovers a mobile phone in her pocket (after like, two weeks?) and calls someone, who alerts Brooker and Rider. She leads them on a bit of dance around different locations, whilst leaving corpses of couple of 'evil' men who look at her wrong for them to clean up so she doesn't get arrested. Zoe acquires a puppy so that we know that she's a nice person.

I didn't notice that this book is Book 7 in a series, and I'm guessing that if you like this sort of thing and have read books 1-6 then the plot would be much more comprehensible. As it was, I never understood what happened to Zoe that caused her to lose her memory. When her memory does begin to come back, it's in awkward 'bits', interspersed with her asking convenient questions to fill in the reader about the other characters (very late in the story). We learn that Rider is a soul healer and Brooker is psychic. And they go about magically healing Zoe.

The problem for me as ever is that the description of this book sounded like it was going to be Zoe kicking ass in the free world, proud and happy as a vampire that kicks patriarchal butt. Actually, although she is 'queen' (small q) of the vampire biker club clan, she's nothing more than a scared figure head. She magically bestows gifts with her special blood, but doesn't actively do anything. Consequently, she's a wet blanket. Why the twin (oh yes, they're twins, forgot to say that) are so keen to get back 'their woman' (I lost count how many times Zoe was 'our woman' or some variant), I just don't know.

Between being completely lost with what was going on with the plot, all the soul healing stuff, the purple prose, the perfect(ly) silly heroine and the absolute good/evil dicotamy, for me, this was a D. That said, clearly for lots of other people the whole biker club vampire thing is like cat nip. This just was much more light and fluffy and Harlequin Presents crossed with bikers and vampires than I was expecting. I was looking for gritty and female power, and I got a girl kitten mewing helplessly and being picked up by a guy with a motorbike.