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The Burning (Erotic Historical Vampire Series) | 
| Author: Susan Squires
Publisher: Saint Martin's Press Inc.
Category: Book
Buy New: £6.99
New (10) Used (14) from £2.23
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 79189
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0312998554
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780312998554
ASIN: 0312998554
Publication Date: April 17, 2006
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1 to 3 weeks
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| Customer Reviews:
Very interesting story but a little too much distasteful sex January 14, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
"The Burning" is the follow up to "The Companion", a Regency era vampire story. I love both vampire tales and historical fiction set in the Regency period and loved "The Companion" with its new take on two common subjects - think how many trees are cut down each year to make Regencies or Vampire mass-market paperbacks.
As soon as I had finished "The Companion" I bought Squires' next two books which are set in the same world and with some of the same characters as "The Companion". The first I turned to was "the Burning" and I was really looking forward to another cracking tale.
Stephan Sincai is a 2,000 year old Vampire who is nicknamed "The Harrier" - he's been trained to kill all the "made" (rather than "born") vampires as they are considered dangerous. Stephan was the one to blame for Ashanti (baddie in the previous book) and so he is trying to atone for his guilt by his service to Rubius the head of the vampires.
Ann Van Helsing is a mad woman. Or is she? She has a strange psychic ability which means when she touches someone she gets all their thoughts and memories which has crippled her; she can only wear the same old clothes (new clothes have to be "broken in" as she reads the seamstress and the weaver's thoughts and feelings) and can't be touched by anyone, even her uncle. Her mother went mad on the night Ann was conceived because of this curse within the female line. So Ann lives as a recluse with her uncle and is his heir - he refused to marry and have children to prevent the disorder being passed down any further.
Unfortunately Ann's cousin Erich Van Helsing wants to get his hands on her money and plans to marry her and then commit her to an asylum after having his wicked way with her. But his plans go rather awry when Stephan Sincai turns up in their village and even stranger things than normal start happening. Stephan has 2,000 years of history and when Ann has to bind up his wounds - and touch him - it starts a whole new chain of events.
Like "The Companion" the back story for our hero is trotted out fairly regularly as flashbacks. And like the former book, his history is pretty nasty. He has spent the last two years being trained as a vampire slayer by three sisters and their training methods seem rather unusual - they consist of training him in sexual stimulation and control. I felt the book dwelled far too much on this aspect of the history, more than it really needed - I wonder if it was written for titillation of the readers. Sadly it didn't work for me, it was too distasteful and there was too much depth and description in it. In the final denouement of the book some of these issues come back and again they were rather overdone.
I docked the book one star for this overreliance on sex and I think it's rather a shame as the basic premise of the book was really good - two misfits finding each other, how does a woman who can feel every memory cope with a man with the memory of twenty lifetimes? Our hero is tortured by his memories as well as physically - he has bucketloads of guilt for having made Ashanti and for various other things - but in some ways this wasn't worked out quite as well as in "The Companion". This book isn't badly written at all, it just wasn't of the same high standard as the previous book. I will be interested to read the third, "The Hunger", focussing on the Countess of Lesse, to see if Susan Squires is fully back on form for her third in this series.
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