Single White Vampire

by Lynsay Sands, 369 pages

New York-based editor Kate Leever gets more than she bargained for when she's assigned to manage her late supervisor's authors. When she tries to induce one of them--Lucern Argeneau, a reclusive writer of wildly popular vampire romance novels--to agree to some book signing tours and interviews, the only response she receives to her many gentle but persistent enquiries is a resounding "No." Worried she'll lose her new job if she doesn't make some progress, she flies up to Toronto to talk to him face-to-face, but finds his resistance in person is just as stubborn and cranky as on paper. She even makes suggestions on how to work around his minor sun allergy, but Luc just won't see reason. Oh, those crazy, arrogant, night-owl authors. Happily, his much more reasonable mother (who oddly doesn't look a day older than he does) plots with Kate to encourage him to agree to just one event--and suddenly it's Luc's turn to get more than he bargained for.

This is a paranormal-ish romance leftover from my handful of romance titles collected for the February challenge (I've got one more on my to-read shelf, so we'll see if I get to it before I have to turn it back in). I say paranormal-ish, because while Luc is very obviously outed to the reader as a vampire from the beginning, his later explanation for his kind's existence is more science fictiony than supernatural (it involves Atlanteans and biological nano-agents). This is a pretty funny read, which makes the romance formula much more palatable for someone like me who doesn't normally read romance-romance on her own. Really, my only gripe about this particular title is the aforementioned explanation for vampirism. Unless one is writing an angsty origins-centric story like those of Anne Rice with vampires perpetually fretting over their raison d'être, most people who knowingly pick up a vampire novel will readily accept that, in the confines of the story, vampires exist and are just part of the natural fabric of nunununess. When Luc abruptly decides to offer an unprompted, oddly pseudo-scientific origin for his family, it veers the story off on a short, irrelevant-seeming tangent. Also, Atleanteans? Really? The cheesiness would perhaps have worked better if he didn't sound so serious while relaying the information. That grumble aside, however, I was surprisingly content to fly through the rest of the book. Perhaps it was Luc's amusing, involuntary immersion in romance writer culture--obviously something with which Sands is intimately familiar? Or Kate's intrepid work ethic in the face of complication after complication?

There appears to be a whole series of books featuring the romantic lives of Luc's various family members past and present (several of whose stories supply the plots of his supposedly fictional novels), so if you enjoy this one and want to do more than just dip your toe in the waters of the goofier side of paranormal romance, you'll be set.