Blood Games [Paperback]

Lee Killough (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

From Lee Killough, the author of BloodWalk, Meisha Merlin presents the new Garreth Mikaelian vampire novel Blood Games Garreth Mikaelian has an enemy... Time. He thought he knew all about being a vampire. After all, he has had fifteen years in the life to learn. But now he discovers that while Time ignores him, he cannot ignore it. Around him everyone he knows is aging: fellow officer and periodic lover Maggie Lebekov, friends, parents. His own son now looks more like a brother. The price of his existence, he realizes, is standing rooted while Time carries everything away from him. But suddenly he has more urgent matters to worry about. Baumen's comfortable peace is shattered by sudden death and a lethal trio playing ever escalating blood games. Garreth finds himself racing time to learn whether the trio's leader is the vampire he appears to be and find a way to deal with him. Garreth must locate the suspects before other law enforcement officers do, to be sure they are captured alive... because if not yet vampires, they have drunk vampire blood and if killed will rise again even more deadly, and unstoppable.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If you're a vampire, please pay close attention. Do you find your immortal life increasingly burdened with the effort of keeping up false appearances? If so, you're not alone. Garreth Mikaelian, a sleuthing vampire, knows how you feel in his third (and tedious) mystery (after Blood Hunt and Bloodlines). He's only been a vampire for 15 years and already it's evident he's unlike his fellow humans. They grow older, while he stays young. His own son looks more like a twin brother every day. The time is coming, his vampire-friendly advisers warn, when he'll have to abandon his old life. Meanwhile, he's still a Kansas cop and on the trail of an albino psycho whose victims include Garreth's partner and sometime lover. Complicating the chase is the possibility that the vicious killer may be a vampire. An indiscreet vampire is a threat to all vampires. Garreth must determine whether to kill him if he is or jail him if he is not. So begins an interminable manhunt. But then just about everything in this novel is interminable. As the popularity of Anne Rice's novels (or on the cult level of such films as Near Dark and Innocent Blood) shows, there's always room for another original take on the vampire theme. Unfortunately, Killough has nothing new or imaginative to offer. Her vampires are a boring lot without a good scare in any of them. (June)paperback, BloodWalk.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"This police procedural with a supernatural twist is one surprise after another; expect that readers will enjoy the tale." -- The Midwest Book Review, May 2001

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 460 pages
• Publisher: Meisha Merlin Publishing, Inc. (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 189206541X
• ISBN-13: 978-1892065414
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,513,087 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I have been storytelling almost as long as I can remember, starting somewhere around the age of four or five with making up my own bedtime stories. In grade school the stories became episodes of my favorite radio and TV shows, predating the fan-written Star Trek literature by decades. Then, in keeping with wisdom that says the golden age of science fiction is about age eleven, at that age I discovered science fiction and fantasy. That first SF novel hooked me on SF and fantasy. But along with the pleasure of devouring this marvelous literature came fear. I lived in a small town with a small library and I saw I would soon read the section dry. So to keep from running out of science fiction, I began writing my own. And because the mystery section adjoined the SF/Fantasy section, leading me to discover mysteries about the same time as SF, my stories tended to combine SF with mystery. They still do, resulting in supernatural mysteries and urban fantasy...with a noticeable fondness for cops. Vampire cop Garreth Mikaelian hunts killers in Blood Hunt and Bloodlinks (published together by Meisha Merlin as BloodWalk) and in Blood Games. I have future cops Janna Brill and Mama Maxwell in three novels (The Doppelganger Gambit, Dragon's Teeth, and Spider Play)space-going cops in Deadly Silents, werewolf cops in my novel Wilding Nights, and a ghost cop in Killer Karma.

Beginning Blood Games, Wilding Nights, Killer Karma and my African fantasy novel The Leopard's Daughter, my books are now being re-published in e-book editions.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Garreth Mikaelian is back., July 22, 2001

By 

C. A. Hawkins (Canberra, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blood Games (Paperback)

Sixteen years after he became a vampire, Garreth Mikaelian is back. This time he's hunting a killer - who -might- be a vampire - across the western United States. Lee Killough meshes the police procedural elements of this story with the vampire elements, making a seamless and absorbing whole.

All this takes place against a background where the main character has to take some major life decisions. As in the previous books in this series (published together as "Blood Walk") Killough has done a wonderful job in fleshing out this sympathetic and entirely human vampire and his dilemmas. Many of her secondary characters from this series return, and a new and fascinating character is introduced about two thirds of the way through. If the author writes a sequel I hope she appears in it.

I waited nearly ten years for this book. It was worth it.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vampire whose human family accepts him., September 12, 2002

By 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg "sf/f writer" (Arizona) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blood Games (Paperback)

Garreth Mikaelian is a fascinatingly different vampire, and maybe the most exciting one of all.

He lives on bottled blood, like most of the vampires I like (Forever Knight etc) and write about (Those of My Blood, Dreamspy -- or even my fantasy vampire, Dorian St. James in the anthology Heaven and Hell from Speculation Press.) But what makes him realistic for me and thus different is the way his ex-partner and family accepts what he is.

It's Garreth who has trouble accepting his human friends' acceptance. His ex-partner's wife is especially interesting for her expertise with the I-Ching and Garreth's attitude toward her pronouncements.

Meanwhile Garreth is acquiring a new family - a vampire family.

This novel, Blood Games, takes us through a necessary transition phase in Garreth's existence, and it's a page turner with a complex multi-leveled plot and rich adult themes.

At the start, Garreth is settled into a stable, somewhat fulfilling and almost happy life. Nothing has happened for years now as he works in the Sheriff's dept. in a small town and becomes well known and trusted. Once again, Lee Killough paints us a picture of a normal person who happens to be a vampire. You can easily picture yourself in his position.

But by the nature of his condition, it can't last. And here in this book is the beginning of change.

The plot is all about chasing a serial killer or three who seem perhaps to be vampires (or think they are). You aren't really sure about what Garreth is chasing until the end -- and neither is he.

He shows us once again that despite being a vampire, he's a cop. It's what he's always been - it's what he wants to be.

And he's still able to use his original identity, but in this novel, he's facing the fact that he must soon move on. And that's the real conflict in this novel - the real developmental tension for these characters -- change. The resistance to change, the confrontation with necessity, the anguished acceptance of change, and the whole new situation that results at the end of the novel -- is all about change.

The new situation at the ending puts me in mind of Fred Saberhagen's FRIEND OF THE FAMILY - the vampire that watches over generations of a human family.

I'm hoping that Lee will carry on Garreth's tale and let us meet up with his family's descendents as he watches over them.

But this book leaves us with a twist. If you like vampire novels at all, you must have this book on your special shelf.

Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Garreth is back, and life for him will never be the same., July 13, 2001

By 

K. Maxwell "katmax1" (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blood Games (Paperback)

Garreth Mikaelian is the original vampire detective, and he's finally back. This book takes place 15 years after the last book in this series (bloodlinks), and the fact that Garreth doesn't age as 'normal' is now starting to become a talking point among his family and the people he works with.

This is an inevitable situation for any vampire-sytle character, if they survive long enough, but not many books actually chronicle with how it would be delt with, given the links to the human world that any vampire would need to survive.

Garreth is grounded in 'real world' police procedures and its limitations, and in many ways that is what sets this series apart from many other 'cop-vampire' books. There are very definate limits to what you can do as a police detective, and still stay as one later when the adventure is over.

In this book, Garreth gets caught in a car accident in daylight, and his is girlfriend killed, while the people who deliberatly crashed into him drink his blood when he is unconcious, beliving him dead.

Garreth is shattered by this turn of events, but in a whirlwind of anger and fear that new vampires have been created, he sets of on a cross country chase down what turns out to be a serial killer.

In many ways this book is a real turning point. What has gone before can no longer be continued and by the end great changes have occured in all the main characters life. It'll be interesting to see where the next book goes.

This book will not be for you if you like vampire stories to be horror stories or full of romance and sex, because this book is really about how a policeman, who just happens to be a vampire, learns to deal with the world as it comes without bending the rules so much that the story becomes ridiculus.

Lee Killough writes fine police based books and by the end you always have the feeling that in the 'real world' this could just have happened. They are always worth reading more than once.