Graveyard Shift by Michael F. Haspil

Synopsis: Police procedurals go supernatural in this gritty urban fantasy debut

Alex Menkaure, former pharaoh and mummy, and his vampire partner, Marcus, who was born in ancient Rome, once hunted evil vampires for UMBRA, a super-secret unit of the NSA. That was before the discovery of a blood substitute and a Supreme Court ruling allowed thousands of vampires to integrate into society.

Now, Alex and Marcus are vice cops in a special police unit. They fight to keep the streets safe from criminal vampires, shape-shifters, blood-dealers, and anti-vampire vigilantes.

When someone starts poisoning the artificial blood, race relations between vampires and humans deteriorate to the brink of anarchy. While the city threatens to tear itself apart, Alex and Marcus must form an unnatural alliance with a vigilante gang and a shape-shifter woman in a desperate battle against an ancient vampire conspiracy.

If they succeed, they’ll be pariahs, hunted by everyone. If they fail, the result will be a race-war bloodierthan any the world has ever seen.

Review: I am always attracted to urban fantasy novels and as soon as I saw this one I confess that I was very intrigued. How not to be with such a cocktail? I was excited by the idea of mixing everything with Egypt.

In this story, we mainly follow Alex Menkaure, a character full of complexity. It was nice to learn more about him, to see how much he had changed in his lifetime. Alex is part of a special police unit that deals with renegade vampires. A vampire problem? It’s up to Alex and Marcus to handle that! But here, someone seems to contaminate the blood of the vampires and it is necessary for our heroes to discover very soon what happens.

It was a pretty nice story to discover but I confess that I had a hard time really getting into it. It must be said that I always have a lot of trouble as soon as we find several characters and I did not see how everything was going to regroup. There are many things happening in parallel, several characters, a lot of complexity and at the same time I would have liked a little more development for each of them.

It was an interesting and very rich reading but I think it was a little different from what I was expecting. I think it will be very interesting to read and learn more about all the characters!

3

mellianefini

 

30 thoughts on “Graveyard Shift by Michael F. Haspil

  1. I’ve never heard of this book, but it sounds really cool! I think I’ll look for some more reviews though, since you didn’t love it, and see what other people think of it before I commit to buying it.

    -Ailsa

  2. This definitely sounds like an interesting urban fantasy premise, sorry it didn’t quite connect better. Hopefully it improves as it goes. I need to read more urban fantasy.

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