4 Stars for The Shake

The Shake
by Mel Nicolai
Genre: Cross-Genre: Adult Vampire Mystery

Summary:

Shake is a vampire. He has to kill. He has a system that tells him who gets a life pass. This has worked for him for a number of years; however, one of his victims changes his mind, and he becomes sucked into a murder case involving a dead cop.

In trying to solve this case, he will have to not only solve the cop’s murder, but he will have to uncover a mystery surrounding an innocent girl, kill some more people, and confront his own past.

The only other vampire he associates with is Mio, cautious and highly unlikely to give anyone a pass if she needs to be fed. His other friend is human, and she doesn’t know he’s a vampire. Still these unlikely mystery solvers will help bleed Shake of his curiosity into the murder of the dead cop solving the crime with unexpected consequences.

Review

This fang tale is not your typical vampire story, but I first started reading it because it reminded me of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire. Both Rice’s protagonist and Nicolai’s protagonist are trying to figure out a right way to live as a vampire. I quickly found out that Shake is very different than Louis, Rice’s protagonist. First, Louis has a moral code that refuses to feast on humans, just animals. Louis doesn’t want to be a vampire. Shake has no such code, just a strong need to figure out who deserves to live. I thought it was a clever twist, because for the first time we have a vampire without morals, but he’s not so bad because he has a desire to understand good and evil.

There is a lot of inner dialogue philosophizing over whom to kill, which I found more interesting than discovering who killed the cop. It reminded me all over again of why I enjoyed Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, of course, Raskolnikov, the protagonist in that story, didn’t have nutritional needs that required killing, but like Shake, he did have an interesting sense of justice.

Helping Shake with the murder case and his personal choices of who to kill is his vampire friend, Mio. She is drawn completely opposite to Shake. Where Shake had trouble killing, she did not. Her character made him constantly aware of what he was – a killer. Karla, his human companion, didn’t have exactly a saintly side to her, but she still tried to make moralistic choices. She was refreshingly good in comparison to Mio and Shake. All of the characters were completely three dimensional with tons of flavor.

The plot itself was carefully calculated bringing together Shake’s past and the mystery he was trying to solve. The ending worked, but I would have liked to see a different kind of resolution than an obvious unromantic truth. It felt too quickly resolved, and almost too tidy. Overall, the ending wasn’t a bad one; it was just a likely one. I really liked the character of Shake, and for me he wasn’t a likely kind of vampire. He’s worth getting to know. In fact, he may change your mind about vampires.

The Shake can be Found at Amazon.com