Facade of Shadows

Title :                Façade of Shadows

Author:             Rick Chiantaretto

Publisher:             Bedside Books

                        American Book Publishing

                        PO Box 65624

                        Salt Lake City UT 84165

ISBN:              1-58982-352-4

            Despite some symptoms of a first author’s book, I was surprised to find I enjoyed reading Façade of Shadows, a horror story about unusual teenage vampires and the slayers that fight against them. The best part of the story was the strong portrayal of conflict between the good and the evil. Here was evil that was intent on the subjugation of a young woman. This evil sprouted out of Egyptian history as the God Set, a vampire, and his son Lucas.  Yet, Lucas has his likeable moments. And the victim Cassi has her own believable reasons for being drawn to Lucas. A dependent love, but love anyway. Too bad their love means the end of the balance in the world.

            The heroes and heroines need to stop Lucas and Cassi from conceiving a child and the odds are against them. Most likeable is Dominique, who is a very strong character and she carries a lot of the weight of some of the most interesting scenes. She has dreams that help explain the ancient Egyptian history, which is provided in a compelling manner. Cynthia opens the story, starring in a touching prologue where she attempts to help a vampire that chose his state out of love and found he’d made the wrong choice. Here the message is you can never recover from a bad choice, there is no forgiveness. By the end of the book, this message is modified in a pleasing manner.

            The dialogue is very well done and through it we learn to like and understand the relationships that grow out of a group of slayers that have never met.

            The plot is lively with a good variety of plot twists and a modicum of gore and violence. Much of the latter is implied rather than explicitly portrayed and usually the heroes take the worst of the damage. Some of the more interesting parts occur when helpers arrive and villains have varying motives and the strong are weaker than they should be.