Book review: Blood Rights by Kristen Painter

Title: Blood Rights
Series:  The House of Comarre
Author: Kristen Painter
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publication date: 01 October 2011
Author’s website:http://kristenpainter.blogspot.com/
Source: NetGalley

Goodreads blurb:
The lacy gold mapped her entire body. A finely-wrought filigree of stars, vines, flowers, butterflies, ancient symbols and words ran from her feet, up her legs, over her narrow waist, spanned her chest and finished down her arms to the tips of her fingers.

Born into a life of secrets and service, Chrysabelle’s body bears the telltale marks of a comarré—a special race of humans bred to feed vampire nobility. When her patron is murdered, she becomes the prime suspect, which sends her running into the mortal world…and into the arms of Malkolm, an outcast vampire cursed to kill every being from whom he drinks.

Now Chrysabelle and Malkolm must work together to stop a plot to merge the mortal and supernatural worlds. If they fail, a chaos unlike anything anyone has ever seen will threaten to reign.

My thoughts:

I will admit it, when I picked this book, it was all about the cover!  I know we all say “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” but be honest . . . we do!  And this cover is spectacular.  It just jumped off the computer screen for me!  It immediately filled me with a feeling of mystery and beauty  - and I found it all in the pages of this book.

Blood Rights are set somewhere in the future but you will not find this reflected in any of the scenes in the book.  The world feels very real and very now . . .  It is also labelled as an Urban Fantasy (not a genre that I usually prefer) but I felt that everything was mostly about the characters.  There is lots of action off course but you will not be disappointed with all the romantic tension between Chrysabelle and Malkolm. 

This is the first book of The House of Comarre series and we are introduced to the world of the comarre.  We are only allowed to see fleeting glimpses but what a world it is.  It is such a new view of vampires and all their companions that I hope much more of this world will be revealed to us in the books to come.  You will see vampires in a whole new light.

Chrysabelle has been comarre (or blood slave) to her patron for a hundred years.  On the night that she hopes to be set free, he is found murdered and she becomes the number one suspect.  She flees into the open world and into the arms of Malkolm, a vampire that has fallen from grace.  But has she now run into the arms of even greater danger?

Malkolm is one of the most tortured souls that I have read in a long time – both physically and mentally.  He has been cursed to kill all that he drinks from.  His body and soul are covered by all his victims and sometimes they force their way out.  Their voices are always present in his mind and he permanently has to cling to his own sanity.

For a large part of the book, Chrysabelle and Mal try to convince themselves that they do not need or want each other but it is a lost course.  They are meant to be together, if only to stop the evil and power-hungry Tatiana from starting a war between mortals and the supernatural.

We also meet a lot of secondary characters – fae, shifters, vampires, fake comarre, ghosts and demons.  I just loved the relationship between Doc (a cursed shifter) and Fi (a ghostly victim of Mal) that live with him in his disintegrating house.

Even though some parts of the book were a bit slow and the villain, Tatiana, a bit one-dimensional, it is a great opening book for the series.  I would like to see what author, Kirsten Painter throws at us in the next books.