Just Finished Reading: The Last Vampire by Patricia Rosemoor and Marc Paoletti (FP: 2008) [345pp] 

Decades after uncovering 'something' in a cave which killed her father and brother, anthropologist Leah Maguire (and expert in the mystic rituals of the past) is hired as a civilian contract expert to a secret military unit known as Team Ultra. At the centre of the team's lab is a 500-year-old mummified body with an unusual DNA structure. Spliced into other creatures it gave them extraordinary abilities and Team Ultra is the final result of those tests. Gifted with superior speed, increased healing and other more outlandish abilities they are the cutting edge of Special Force black ops. But they are not alone in their interest in the mummified corpse. A local voodoo priestess has discovered its whereabouts and knows exactly what it is – a vampire, the last of its kind. Determined to use its power for her own ends she uses her magical abilities to revive it and enable its escape. Team Ultra has a new mission – find and recapture the vampire before it can bring its kind back! 

In my defence I bought this quite some time ago (probably around the time it was published) and had fixated on the word 'vampire' in the title. The only reason I finished it was that I had already DNF'd two books this year which is my limit. Fortunately, this did have one redeeming quality – it was a FAST read. As to the rest... 

The 'story', and I use the word advisably and in its very broadest sense, was at best questionable from the very beginning. I'm going to give 'SPOILERS' here for which I make zero apology. The 'vampire' was self-made (a new one on me) using alchemy to make himself semi-immortal (he's trying to go all the way but that takes something else which is an element in one of the subplots) so that he can fight and hopefully destroy the Catholic church who essentially allowed his mother to die on their watch 500 years previous to the novels present timeline. Because he's an alchemical vampire none of the standard kill methods work (except sunlight – so naturally they try to take him down at night because of 'reasons') and, weirdly, GOLD – supposedly because it's an 'ethereal' element. So, "liquid gold" bullets... I kid you not! 

I soon discovered that the characters in the book – ALL OF THEM – could readily be divided into two types: those who were passively stupid and those who were actively stupid. If that wasn't enough this travesty of a novel contained multiple instances of one of the things that I particularly hate in fiction – when a character has a vital piece of information and either deliberately withholds it for purely plot reasons (generally in order to get others into difficulty for an action sequence) or is told not to divulge that information to the very people who could solve a problem in order that the unresolved issue can move the plot 'forward' another inch. I COULD go on, but you no doubt get the drift. This was, without much in the way of competition by far the worst book of the year and quite possibly for several years before that. The inevitable love interest between the two main characters read like something written by a teenage girl who has yet to kiss a boy never mind sleep with him. Even if the book was AIMED at a teenage audience (which it might very well have been) they would still be laughing over the way the characters GUSHED over each other. [shudder] So, without a single redeeming feature I would have to classify this as terrible and advise anyone who comes across it to AVOID picking it up. If it's sitting on your shelf presently unread, I'd suggest giving it to charity or possibly lighting fires with it.