Review – Blood on Silk (Awakened by Blood, Book 1) by Marie Treanor (2.5/5 stars)

Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Length: 336 pages
Publisher: Signet
Release Date: September 7, 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0451231567
Stand Alone or Series: 1st book in the Awakened by Blood series
Source: Swapped through Paperbackswap.com
Rating: 2.5/5 stars

I picked this book up a number of years ago because I liked the cover and the synopsis sounded interesting. It ended up being a pretty stereotypical paranormal romance novel. It was okay but not great. This is the first book in a trilogy.

Elizabeth Silk is a Scottish academic researching her thesis in Romania. She is doing research on the folklore featuring vampires and trying to come up with a theory behind these legends. One legend always escapes her theories though; that of Saloman. By a strange set of circumstances she ends up finding Saloman’s tomb and accidentally awakens him. Little does Elizabeth know how much danger the human race is now that she has awoken one of the Ancient Ones.

This book started out promising. I liked the idea of an academic woman who is researching all these vampire legends. Unfortunately this skeleton of a story was only there to drive Elizabeth to Saloman and have her fall instantly in love with him.

There are a lot of very typical paranormal elements to this story. Elizabeth is a super frigid woman who doesn’t care about sex..until seeing Saloman turns her into a giant raging pulsing hormone of a woman. Even when Saloman is abusing her she is drawn to him and wants him (yawn). Not only that, but Saloman (who is thousands of years old) is completely undone by Elizabeth and falls instantly in love with her.

Saloman is super alpha and uber bossy. Him and Elizabeth can’t stand each other unless they are having really hot and spontaneous sex. The sex scenes themselves were fairly ho-hum…I just wasn’t feeling the chemistry between these two.

There is some plot about Saloman going up against both other ancient vampires and a group of vampire hunters (that Elizabeth ends up involved with). But really most of the story is Elizabeth and Saloman either trying to kill each other or screw each other.

The writing is decent and the story flows decently as well. I just found most of it to be plain silly and very typical, not at all something creative or new. In the end I was glad to be done with it and had absolutely no need to ever read about Elizabeth or Saloman again.

Overall very typical and predictable paranormal romance. I didn’t really enjoy the characters and thought the story was readable but not all that intriguing or engaging. This just wasn’t my cup of tea. On top of that there are a ton of vampire paranormal romance books out there to read that are better than this one. Not recommended.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge
– Mount TBR Reading Challenge