Book Review: Blood Debt, by Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff's novel Blood Debt is the final book in the Victoria Nelson series, which began with Blood Price. Unfortunately, it's a much less satisfying ending than the previous book, Blood Pact, would have made. (Please be wary of spoilers ahead, especially if you haven't read Blood Pact.)

The book's first issue is that the plot doesn't really fit with the rest of the series. While the series as a whole focus on supernatural plots - demons, werewolves, ancient Egyptian gods - and the previous novel used a scientific angle to approach the supernatural - researchers creating zombies in the lab - the supernatural element of Blood Debt is very forced. The main plot is based on, of all things, urban legends about black market organs and kidney thefts. The supernatural element is that Henry, for little reason other than the plot requiring it, becomes haunted by the victims of an organ selling ring, who are scaring people to death in order to coerce his help. It feels tacked on as an afterthought, as if the organ theft story came from a completely different series. adparams.getadspec('c_billboard1');

The next problem is Vicki and Henry. At the end of Blood Pact, Vicki is dying and Henry turns her in order to save her. Then he leaves town, because vampires are instinctively territorial and cannot share hunting grounds. This makes a fitting, if bittersweet, conclusion to the series, whose rules of vampires are designed to avoid the issue of simply bringing across the people you love without any consequences.

In the interim between books, Vicki has gotten used to her new life as a vampire, and Michael Celluci has started filling the role she used to fill for Henry, who has moved to Vancouver with his occasional lover Tony. When Henry enlists her help to get rid of the ghosts, however, they discover that the territorial nature of vampires might not be so instinctual after all, but rather an outdated learned behavior from a time when towns were too small to sustain more than one vampire. While Henry and Vicki no longer relate as they used to, they get along fairly well for people who should supposedly be trying to kill each other.

This sudden change the series's rules of vampirism seems like cheating, a way to make the Henry/Vicki fans happy without actually getting them together for good, and a way to disregard the negative consequences of turning someone into a vampire. This change is a disappointing one, because the solitariness of vampires was one of the more interesting things about the series, preventing it from getting overrun with vampires, and the clear negative effects of the vampire's condition made it seem realistic and not something to be coveted too much, rather than a way to cheat death scot-free.

These two factors combined make Blood Debt mostly unsatisfying. It's a decent book, and Vicki's new status as a vampire prompts some interesting developments in her character, but it's not final enough to make a good last book of the series.