Blood Pact
Review by The Mad Bibliographer, submitted on 28-Oct-2001

Review by Cathy Krusberg: Blood Pact

Adapted from "Vampires in Print" in The Vampire's Crypt #9 (Spring 1994).

Review by Cathy Krusberg
Internet: ckberg_AT_uga.cc.uga.edu

Tanya Huff. Blood Pact. DAW, 1993; $4.99/$5.99.

Blood Pact is Tanya Huff's fourth book about private detective Vicki Nelson, her friend and former colleague Detective-Sergeant Mike Celluci, and vampire Henry Fitzroy. Vicki feels she is being attacked from all sides. Mike Celluci wants commitment. Henry Fitzroy wants commitment. And in the midst of this whirl of competition for Vicki's affection, her mother dies. "I didn't call her. And when she called me, I didn't answer. And then she died."

And then the body of Vicki's mother disappears.

Interspersed with the drama of Henry Fitzroy lending aid and comfort at night and Celluci helping investigate by day, another drama is played out, a drama of strange, unspeaking research subjects referred to by number rather than name, subjects whose predecessors have suffered from such ailments as putrefaction, subjects discussed in the light of Reanimation of the Human Body by Tailored Bacteria and Servomotors.

For those of you who thought mad scientists had gone out of style: not quite. This book features a mad scientist, the mad scientist's mad assistant, and one hopping mad Vicki Nelson.

I found Blood Pact uncomfortably intense because of the ideas it explores: Vicki's fear of commitment; Henry Fitzroy's competition with Mike Celluci and the uneasy harmony they must achieve for Vicki's sake; the death of Vicki's mother and the use of something more than just her corpse in a particularly ghastly research project ... brrr! Huff pointedly makes this the last book in her series about Vicki Nelson (yes, it ends happily), and perhaps just as well. With the themes that Blood Pact is built on, any sequel would be hopelessly anticlimactic.