I was given this book to review.

Remember back when vampires were definitely creatures of horror, bound to humanity, yet whole apart from it? Welcome back to that time, with Sam Stone's Futile Flame, the second in her Vampire Gene trilogy.

In the first book readers met Gabi, a two hundred year old vampire, on the hunt for a perfect mate who instead ends up with Lilly, the last person he expected to survive his killing kiss. In Futile Flame a monster stalking Lilly and Gabi pushes him to re-explore his roots, now armed with the knowledge that Lilly was, in fact, his own mortal descendant. Gabi hunts down his maker, Luci, once an infamous member of the Borgia family, terrorized by her own brother and finally turned in a vicious black ritual. Surely Luci has some idea to the identity of the beast that now threatens her entire vampiric family and how it became what it is today.

With all the style and charisma of Ann Rice, but less indulgence and crazy, Futile Flame is a sensual, deadly tale of immortals, sins and the unknown wrapped up in a vivid take on the past. Stone's characters capture the same studied, immersive style, a sense of being in love with every detail of the world around them, past, present, or even future, that readers fell in love with in Rice's intensely detailed earlier works, as well as the long standing charm of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count Saint Germain series. Rich, enticing and utterly charming Stone's vampires are ambrosia to horror fans hungry for the good old monstrous vampires who look, walk and sound like us, but hold our deaths in their gaze. ( )