The Blood Countess is just a great premise and a fun, light read that I found strangely compelling; I’d started reading it with my morning cup of coffee, and it haunted me all day, running movies in my mind.

Unfortunately it just didn’t quite come together. This is the first book by Tara Moss I’ve read, and I’m told that her adult stuff is diabolically good; although the writing is suburb in The Blood Countess, and certainly I can see how her adult material would be great from the glimpses I see in this story, the whole book is like she’s taken what was going to be an adult story and turned it into a YA for marketing reasons, rather than started out with the intent to write a YA.

Our protagonist, Pandora English, has moments of seeming real, but the we slip back into this ‘idea’ of a character. There is also the problem with her age, her actions are too young for someone has hold as she is, and too old for someone as young.

Hunky soldier dreams were not supposed to involve sad stories. Hunky soldier dreams were supposed to involve the kind of love-making I read about in my novels – the kind of lovemaking I hope to one day experience.

Pandora is 19 , completely unqualified, and off to the big smoke of New York, where , because she’s so enthusiastic, she has a job offer/interview lined up with a popular magazine.

However, we also have Pandora’s ‘aunt’, who is just the most wonderfully divine character, very Channel chic, with attitude a a touch of eccentricity and made the story come alive in her brief flashes into the plot.

The plot itself is quite simplistic, with twists that aren’t relatively predictable, but the main issue is this age thing. If Pandora had been 17 and going for a holiday work-experience type of thing, it would have worked perfectly. If we’d just left out the random sexiness; it would have worked. But overall it just didn’t quite gel together.

However, once we got the teething problems out of the way, the story started to settle in to be an enjoyable, light, read, and shows promise of continuing on to be  a pleasant series