Uprising by Scott G Mariani (Vampire Federation)

8/10

For me vampire novels tend to be hit or miss. They are either incredible with a great storyline or they are just an excuse to write about vampires having sex. Fortunately Uprising isn’t the latter one of these options.

Uprising is a bit of a vampire mystery story with not that much mystery in it since you follow the story from both sides; the good guys and the bad guys. You follow a Vampire Federation agent, Alex Bishop and detective Joel Solomon as they investigate two separate sets of murders that force them to work together. Meanwhile Gabrielle Stone is working against the Vampire Federation to try and bring back the old ways of the vampire.

The idea of the Vampire Federation is pretty cool and I like the idea of vampire scientists finding new ways for vampires to integrate into society. One particular aspect I was particularly iffy on was the idea that vampires could walk into the sunlight. Vampires in sunlight have always been a touchy subject for me, helped in no way by the Twilight series, but in Uprising I feel I can excuse it, to an extent, since without it the story would go nowhere. It does allow the vampires more freedom of movement and a greater sense of urgency to get things done at crunch times.

I do like the way that Mariani has written the vampires. Too often I find that vampires are completely evil (which is not necessarily a bad thing) or are made harmless for the younger Twilight crowd. They do tend to get a bit bland in a lot of modern books but in Uprising you have a wide variety of personalities amongst the vampires ranging from having natural ‘evil’ urges to downright ‘Kill all humans and destroy the world’ evil.

I would say the story can get a little predictable but I found myself overlooking it thanks to great writing and fantastic pacing. I have to admit that I am rarely impressed by how chapters are laid out. Short chapters tend to annoy me and break up the story but I’ve found that the way that Mariani has laid out his chapters not only works brilliantly to keep the story moving but it makes you want to keep reading, which is always a plus.

I would recommend this book if you enjoyed reading books like Nightwatch. The characters are determined and well written, the action sequences are wonderfully dramatic and there is no taming of the vampires simply to pander to some of the modern audiences who can’t seem to conceive that vampires are born to be evil. It’s not as good, in my opinion, as Nightwatch and I would have liked it to be longer but I suppose that’s what the sequel is for, isn’t it?