10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Requiem series of novels recovers!, July 28, 2005
This review is from: Marriage of Virtue and Viciousness (Vampire the Requiem #3) (Paperback)
After Blood in and Blood out i was mortaly afraid of the next novels quality, but i shouldn't not have been. Marriage rivals Hunger for quality and flow of story line, and character development. we are brought back to the tale of solomn birch, who as we re-call was forced into partial slavery to the prince, but what other readers may not have realised, this seriously threatens his standing in the Sanctum. We also have our first view of a vampire hunter, and the way the character is handled is unexpected, and shapes up the new WOD nicely.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Marriage of Virtue & Viciousness Review, March 27, 2009
This review is from: Marriage of Virtue and Viciousness (Vampire the Requiem #3) (Paperback)
At least this book got back on track for the trilogy, this time the story focusing on Simon Birch and the Prince. It was better and I can hope that White Wolf will consider putting out more novels for the other game lines.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The least interesting of the Vampire Requiem novels, January 26, 2007
This review is from: Marriage of Virtue and Viciousness (Vampire the Requiem #3) (Paperback)
This book is all foreplay. It spends entirely too much time leading up to the "Indulgence," a time when the prince of Chicago lifts his ban on killing other vampires and embracing. Reading this book is like watching CSPAN for vampires. It's all political intrigue and posturing, which is normal for a World of Darkness book and a Vampire book, but still... There's too much of it here without any action to balance it. There is simply VERY little action or substance to the novel. By substance, I mean, it's like a soap opera; not much happens. Even the few events that transpire at the end with Bishop Birch are not so surprising. I honestly found "Blood In, Blood Out" and "A Hunger Like Fire" to be far more interesting reads, and so was "Three Shades of Night," even though it was redundant in the retelling of the same story by three different parties.
The characters are not developed enough, either. There are too many of them, with no concentration on any of them, with the exception of Velvet (and the ending with her WAS surprising!). Most of the characters float in and out of the story too quickly. It would have been better to really focus on a few in more detail.
I think part of the problem with these novels is the entire setting of Vampire Requiem. It's a poor rehash of Vampire the Masquerade. It's too similar, keeping a few, but not enough, of the old things and adding things that just made it worse. There is no Sabbat, the vampire equivalent of a rabid pit bull that has broken his leash. They made it interesting. There was open war between them and the Camarilla. In Requiem, they are all part of one big masquerade, each competing orderly for power. The Carpathians are like a weaker version of the Anarchs of VtM. And the origins of the vampires makes them less interesting as with VtM. Being associated with the legend of Longinus (spelling?) makes the oldest of them less than 2000 years old. There are no methuselahs or antediluvians. There is no Cain legend. There are no "final nights," and it doesn't feel like Gehenna is right at the doorstep, all things with made VtM a better setting.
This is an average vampire book. It's not a waste of time to read. There are just better WofD books out there to read, including the 3 that I mentioned in this review.
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