'Blood Rites' (#6 of the Dresden Series) by Jim Butcher

Dresden lives in a spot on my heart right next to the Southern Vampire Mysteries. It is in this way that my reviews for both series are terribly skewed. That said, 'Blood Rites', by Jim Butcher, the sixth in a long chain of tales, is my favorite.

For fear of giving away too much - because that's so easy to do with these - this one has Dresden finding a puppy, getting himself hired to solve a mystery surrounding a porn set, all while working to try and defeat a new Black Court vampire nest.  In true Dresden style, he stumbles his way through it all, cracking jokes, making deals (that may, or may not end up working in his favor), and taking names. 

Seriously though, if you've never picked up a book in the series I urge you, (once again), to get out there and get cracking! This series is too good to miss. And if you're a Dresden fan already... well, you probably read this one years ago, but if you haven't gotten to it yet, this one is absolutely worth the read.

"Blood of Anteros" by Georgia Cates

This is the first book in a series that I will not be continuing because I couldn't even get through the first half.

There. I said it and yes, you read correctly. I am writing a review for a book that was, in my opinion, so terrible that I will never find out how Curry eludes his maker Marsala. I won't ever find out how the doomed romance between him and Chansey resolves. I'll never get a chance to figure out what being an Agape really means to any of them.

And what's worse? I don't care to.  For the first time in my brief history as a book reviewer I'm throwing out the golden rule of bracketing every critique in two compliments. It just isn't possible for me this time.  In fact, I almost didn't review "Blood of Anteros" because after looking at all the glowing reviews for this series, some even written by other reviewers that I follow and trust, there is a small part of me that believes that maybe, just maybe, I'm the outlier - and it's my opinion that stinks... not this book. But after further consideration I truly feel like this one needs to avoided. But why? I'll give you three reasons:

1.  Curry is a vampire. A vampire who can walk in the daylight because of some strange ecliptical happening. Which is all well and good but once you get reading he'll say things like he can't eat real food, making a big excuse to avoid going down to breakfast because he doesn't want his non-food-eating self revealed. But then a chapter or two later he'll be scarfing breakfast with the same group of people.
2. Even by the halfway point I still got the sense that the author was still trying to figure out the point and overall, vampire element felt like it was jammed into the story. 
3. Lastly, the editing is terrible! This in and of itself makes it really, really, difficult to read because I constantly found myself trying to make sense of a misused (in some cases totally missing) word or poorly punctuated sentence. If this thing was being graded by my old college English professor, this thing would have gone in the trash and gotten an F.

To everyone who loves these books I'm sorry for the hard lined review. To everyone else, read at your own risk!