18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful addition to the series, March 1, 2008
This cozy series is one of my absolute favorites. It's everything I love in a cozy: a quaint English village with interesting residents, lots of tea, and a spunky protaganist with a lot of heart. I always wait with anticipation for the newest installment.
American Lori Shepherd, her American husband Bill, and their five year old twin sons are continuing to enjoy their lives in their beautiful English village of Finch. The twins are thriving at school (although Lori is experiencing major separation anxiety), but one day, their teacher informs Lori and Bill that the boys have been telling their classmates that they saw a vampire while riding their horses at Anscombe Manor, the estate owned by Lori and Bill's good friends, Emma and Derek Harris.
Lori enlists the help of their other good friend, Kit Smith, whose family once owned the Manor, and who is employed there as stablemaster and riding instructor. Together, with supernatural help from Aunt Dimity, they set out to discover the identity of this vampire. But, much to their surprise, Lori and her friends discover a lot more than that. Indeed, they discover fascinating family secrets, betrayals, and great love stories that occurred forty years ago. The story is well-written, clever, and the multiple mysteries will keep you guessing right up until the end. As is always the case with this series, the ending is completely satisfying and dare I say, warm and fuzzy.
I love this series because it brings back characters/townspeople who have become like old friends, yet the author keeps it interesting by revealing previously unknown things about them. In this installment, it's Kit Smith about whom we learn more. Also, we get introduced to new, intriguing residents and I hope the author brings them back in the future. Lastly, as fans of this series have come to expect, there is a delicious pastry recipe in the back of the book.
I highly recommend the book to all Aunt Dimity fans. (For what it's worth, I liked it better than the previous one, Aunt Dimity Goes West). For those who aren't familiar with the series, I think you'll enjoy it as a "stand-alone", but you might get more out of it if you read the previous books in order. I say that only because the author, as I mentioned, reveals more truths about the main characters, and the emotional impact will be greater if you're already familiar with them.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Frothy, cozy and undead, October 9, 2008
The titular Aunt Dimity may be technically undead (a sort of resident ghostie) but that's no preparation for an encounter with a vampire.
Well, unsurprisingly there's something of a problem with that in "Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter," the thirteenth volume of the cozy, endearingly offbeat mystery series. The actual mystery is scattered all over the board in bits and pieces, but the romantic troubles, warm comedic moments, and cozy English-countryside atmosphere really make this little mystery a frothy charmer. Now if only I knew why guys actually like Nell...
Lori is having a rough time dealing with her sons' entry into school, and things get even rougher when the boys admit that they saw a VAMPIRE during their riding lessons (specifically, "Rendor the Destroyer of Souls"). Lori becomes obsessed with the possibility of some weirdo hanging around there, and with the blessing of Aunt Dimity, she and a very skeptical Kit go prowling for clues. They find them -- a shred of red silk and a bunch of pointy-toed bootprints. It probably wasn't a vampire, but someone WAS there.
Adding to the mystery is a strange, friendly man who's just returned from Australia, and an old lady who seriously insists that the DuCarals -- a reclusive nouveau riche family -- are really vampiric cousins of Dracula. Yes, that Dracula -- the old bat thinks that Stoker's story was true.
While Lori is seriously spooked by all this, she isn't quite willing to believe that there really IS a vampire -- she's more inclined to think that the DuCarals are hiding a mad heir who THINKS he's a vampire. But it seens the DuCarals do have a number of mysteries connected to them -- to an apparent murder that happened many years ago, and to secret scandals that nobody in the village is willing to reveal.
It's pretty much impossible to resist picking up a book with a title like "Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter," if nothing else to see what the plot is about. I was personally expecting some kind of spoof on the current trends of urban fantasy, and stuff like that. Fortunately this is less urban fantasy than a modern version of an English cozy mystery, complete with eccentric locals, small villages, mildly decayed manor-houses, tea and a lot of cottages.
While Atherton's mystery is not terribly intricate, she does do a good job scattering the clues of a long-dead mystery, and linking them up to minor mysteries of the present. She also slathers it in plenty of humour ("To my way of thinking, there wasn't much difference between doing battle with a vampiric psycho pervert and riding a horse") and drapes it in the rain-washed, muddy, ye-olde flavour of an English country village. Not to mention some spookiness when Lori visits the local Crazy Old Crone and subsequently gets all spooked out by the DuCaral attic.
And there's the a mildly bittersweet subplot, with Lori trying to figure out why Kit is so romantically introverted, even claiming that he'll never marry anyone because he's meant to be alone. The biggest problem: the continuing preoccupation with Nell, the local Nefertiti who is so gorgeous that hot wealthy young men flock to her from all over continental Europe. Problem is, Atherton never shows us her supposedly perfect personality, so it's hard to care that Kit keeps spurning her.
Lori is a neurotically sweet protagonist, with a dogged attitude towards detecting -- and her past traumatic cases serve as nice backstory. Although she's a wee bit excitable to really catch onto the most logical scenarios, she's certainly determined to figure out what's going on. The more logical brain comes from Kit, the "tortured saint" who helps Lori piece together the various clues -- some of which turn out to have a surprising connection to him. That part certainly came as a surprise.
While not what the title would imply, "Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter" gives us plenty of Lori looking for Rendor the Destroyer of Souls, frothy little "cozy" mysteries, and some suitably plot twists. A fun little read.
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