Blood Rights by Kristen Painter

DESCRIPTION:

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 REVIEW:

Blood Rights by Kristen Painter

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Chrysabelle is a comarre’, a special race of humans that feed vampire nobles. When her patron is murdered, she is forced to run for her life and freedom into the world of normal humans. There she meets Malkolm, an outcast to the vampire world, and then she tries to kill him.
It is only afterwards that she discovers that he is the only vampire that can help her. As she struggles to survive in a world she isn’t use to, and as Malkolm tries to fight the curse that prevents him from ever rejoining the vampire world, can they survive the chaos that they will have to face to save their worlds?


This is an AMAZING book! And you know it is good when you get it from the publisher, read it, and immediately go and buy yourself the first book, the second book, and pray for the 3rd book to come out FASTER! I loved a lot about Ms. Painter’s beautiful mythology about vampires, ghosts, shifters, and the comarre’. This book isn’t a light read, both in genre and subject matter. The comarre’ are specially bred humans that are almost like medieval serfs or even special vampire courtesans to the vampirical lords. They have no rights, and are constantly watched. The vampires are split between the nobles and the fringe, and the nobles can shift their appearance between vampire demon face and human faces.


I love Chrysabelle and Malkolm as a whole. Chrysabelle’s character is a beautiful combination of innocence and wisdom. At 115 years of age, she has never been around humans that weren’t comarre’, and thus when she enters the human world, it is a huge adjustment of people touching her, and not understanding the way of the comarre’ (there aren’t any in the human world). She has so much strength, but a huge weakness for her is when she doesn’t bleed herself. She has to, just to prevent “blood poisoning”.
Malkolm is a tortured soul. As a human he was an executioner, but then a vampire turned him. He killed his sire, and has been cursed ever since. Worse yet, a second curse was placed upon him, and every time he kills someone he carries their name and their ghost with him.


Other characters that seem to add to it all are Fi and Doc. Fi is the first and only ghost that haunts Malkolm, and Doc is a cursed shifter that turns into a house cat instead of a leopard. The romance between them is a beautiful bright spot amongst the death and violence of this book. I love how Fi, even though Malkolm murdered her, she still does what she can to help him. Also the strength of Fi as she deals with her own torturous death as well as the constant torture that Malkolm has every day.


Overall, this book is has the beautiful combination darkness and lightness, the joy of life and the sorrow of death. I am definitely looking forward to reading the other books in this series.


**This book might not be appropriate for all readers. Though there are no sex scenes, there are frequent murders/deaths, and some of the scenes might be a bit disturbing for some people.**




Happy Reading!


Cana