Just Finished Reading: Succubus Blues by Richelle Mead

Georgina Kincaid isn’t your average bookshop assistant. For one thing she’s effectively immortal. For another she is supernaturally alluring – which goes with the fact that she’s a Succubus, a sex-demon. As part of Seattle’s supernatural community her main job is to seduce humans on the orders of the cities arch-demon whilst taking their life energy to sustain herself. It’s a pretty good gig until a vampire who threatened her turns up dead and the authorities become suspicious of her activities. However, it’s not long before the true killer shows his colours as well as his love for Georgina.

Despite the many shortcomings of this hefty volume it was a very easy read – probably because the content was so light and fluffy. Inevitably it seems these days the central character is very pretty and very sassy, always ready with the come-back line. At least here Georgina isn’t a cheap Buffy knock-off (as so many of the new breed of urban fantasy heroines seem to be) but is actually virtually helpless against any kind of violence. No high-kicks for this demon! Swiftly making my way through a tad over 470 pages – at a romping 150 pages a day – because of the basic lack of any real content, I found this book just about readable. Fortunately I haven’t already bought any more of this series and I really don’t intend to. It’s hard to tell if this was written for teenagers – and whether or not that’s an insult to teenagers – as the ‘story’ (such as it was) revolved around Georgina’s love life or lack thereof – seeing that anyone who had regular sexual contact with her would have a very short (though presumably very pleasurable) lifespan. Surprisingly though, despite the main character needing sex to exist at all there was very little sexual content in this book and what sex there was, was very tame indeed. Basically this was a great big nothing of a book that can hardly be recommended even as the light read I found it to be.