The President's Vampire by Christopher FarnsworthMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Jacket Blurb: For 140 years, Nathaniel Cade has been the President's Vampire, sworn to protect and serve his country. Cade's existence is the most closely guarded of White House secrets: a superhuman covert agent who is the last line of defense against nightmare scenarios that ordinary citizens only dream of.
When a new outbreak of an ancient evil-one that he has seen before- comes to light, Cade and his human handler, Zach Barrows, must track down its source. To "protect and serve" often means settling old scores and confronting new betrayals . . . as only a centuries-old predator can.
Book number two in the series.
This one had difficulty in keeping my attention. In fact, I set it aside for nearly a month before picking it back up again. My main contention was how fragmented the story was - it was like reading a series of tweets. Just about the time I could settle into the current POV, the plot was on to something else. Add in the "history" blurbs at the beginning of each chapter tweet and I became annoyed enough to lose interest.
It wasn't until nearly halfway through the book when everything started to coalesce enough to engage my interest to finish the book. A 2 hour plane flight also played a role. Our vampire Cade is still nasty, his "girlfriend" Tania is an interesting counterpoint, and Jake grows some balls. The political setting is as ugly - if not worse - as the monsters Cade and Jake are fighting. There are layers to the political bureaucracy and secrecy enough to make the CIA's head spin.
Ultimately, I think this book could have been as strong as the first one if the tweet-like chapters had been condensed into something longer than a paragraph and the "historical" blurbs at the chapter heads shorter or fewer of them. Recommended with reservations.
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