Customer Reviews

The Midnight Work

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(27)

 

 

The initial description of the book is enticing, but a little misleading. The description seems comedic, and light hearted. This book is neither, the main characters kill people without provocation and there is nothing in this story that would make you care for these characters. Also, the book did not read in a coherent fashion. It felt as though something was missing, like descriptions or backgrounds of characters and events that would help the reader "get the full picture." Another reviewer stated that this was not the typical "Buffy" or "Anita Blake" version of vampires, and that is true. But you do wish for the presence of these two characters so they can stake the vampires in this book and put them out of their misery.

This was one of the most disappointing books I have ever read. The synopsis on the back made it sound so intriguing and just the sort of book I love to read. Boy was I wrong. First of all the premise of the book on the back is full of inaccuracies. Sophie doesn't 'forgive' Olivier for turning her into a vampire, nor does she think vampirism is cool. She whines her way through the entire book, both about Olivier and being a vampire. There is no battle between Sophie and the fairy, as she hasn't a clue about anything other than bemoaning her existence. Even the ending was abysmal. Sophie was completely unlikeable as the lead female. I had to struggle to get through the entire book. The only reason I did so was that I kept hoping the story would get better. It didn't. Sophie's whining and juvenile attitude just got worse. I kept hoping someone would slap her and tell her to 'Snap out if it!' I realize that this was Miss Sims take on what would "real" people do if they were turned into a vampire, but I just couldn't get behind and relate to any of the characters. I don't see how anyone gives this book more than 1 star. The plot jumps everywhere, the dialogue is stilted and totally incohesive at times as to make the book unreadable. I honestly do not know how this book was even published!! Save your money and spend it on a book by Sherilyn Kenyon or Katie McAlister, two authors who really know how to do paranormal romance!

I've been an avid TOR Fantasy reader for a while, so when TOR started publishing a TOR Romance line, I thought it would be great. The first books I read were pretty good. Revenge Gifts was wonderful, Hunter's Moon & WarPrize were great fictionoal reads w/ a less Romanctic bent, and Susan's Kearney's books are kind of like SF erotica. Overall, most of the books I've read from the TOR Romances tended to be less on the Romance sections than other books and more on Plot, which can be a good thing.

But this book, Midnight Work, had nothing going for it. I am horrified that this author was able to get this drivel published.

The blurb on the back made the book seemed like an amusing vampire read. It was anything but.

The beginning of the book starts out interesting, up until Sophie, the heroine becomes a vampire. Afterwards, the book immediately goes downhill from there. Unfornately she becomes a vampire very early w/in the book.

After becoming a vampire, the plot starts revolving around murder, mayhem, robbery, revenge from worker competition, theogology drivel, reincarnation, magic, witches, and fairies for goodness sake.

The most amazing thing I can think of the heroine is that how can a phd canidate possibily be too stupid to live. All the troubles appear because the characters are too dumb to ask anything. Not to mention, none of the charactes in the book had any redeeming qualities. The hero in the book is a beta male, whom even the heroine is always thinking he should be more pro-active and always snidely thinking that women controlled him. The other characters in the book were so one dimensional that it really didn't matter whether they were in the book or not.

As for all the blood and gore of innocent people, it was just plain sick, because there really was no guilt or conscience in ripping out and eating someones eyes so you could rob a store, sacrificing people to run a ritual by decapitation or evisceration. Too much detail on the blood and gore and absolutely no emotion beyond a slight guilt after the facts.

Here's a list of all the horrible things about this book:
- Blood & Gore
- Useless Murder and Mayhem
- Juvenile Cringeworthy language
- Next to no Romance
- Villains that have no reasons other than to be Evil (Although, here the vampires appear to be the one that is doing more Evil than the villain)
- Theological philosphies that are completely incomprehesible as to why the vampires used to follow those dictates.
- How the vampires came to be is never explained.
- Yancy type of hero
- Truly the most irritating & annoying heroine I have ever read.
- An incomprehensible plot involving revenge schemes gone bad, pixies, fairies, elves, kidnapped humans to build stuff in FairyLand, witches, vampires that are reincarnated, and vampires that are really really dumb as doornails.
- A inconclusive conclusion that leaves a reader trying to flip more pages to read what in the world happened

I highly not recommend anyone this book. If I could I'd give it 0 Stars.

The description of the book sounded great, but the actual story was kind of sucky. Like a previous reviewer stated, it jumped around alot and I had a hard time following the story.

I hated that Sophie and Norah killed whoever whenever. And Olivier just accepted this. He changed Sophie when she died and was supposed to be her teacher, but he let her run off as soon as she woke up. She killed an innocent man on her way home and then proceeded to change her friend. And how was her friend changed, you ask? Well the heroine basically went up to her and asked: "Do you want to be a vampire?" Norah's answer: "Sure." You have GOT to be kidding me.

The whole thing seemed rushed, like the author had to get from point a to b in a certain number of pages and forget everything else. I don't normally write a review, but this book aggravated me enough that I HAD to.

Back cover description is definitely misleading.

I cannot even finish this book. It is soooo boring. All I have read in the first 129 pages is mostly crap that seems to be repeating itself about the past. The excerpt on the back of this book sounded sooo promising. If the story line would move along and we could get less detailed paragraphs of who's friends with who and the why's of every little thing it probably wouldn't be too bad. I keep skipping paragraphs and sentences because they are boring and make no sense. For goodness sakes just tell a story and watch the typos!!!

In Chicago, though she knows how dangerous it is to meet a stranger, Sophie feels a connection with her chat line friend Oliver so she agrees to see him. Upon seeing her in person at a bar and combining that with the blog exchanges, he believes she is his destiny whom he lost about a millennium or so ago. She ignores his new Age fetish as he makes her come alive until an accident leaves her dying. When she recovers, she realizes she is no longer human; Oliver has changed her into a vampire, saving her "life".

Shocked, Sophie is not sure whether she should hate her mentor or love him; she knows she still remains attracted to him. Still she has the time of her life due to him until she panics as she failed to feed the cat and runs away from her teacher. Oliver is scared, a new feeling since he became a bloodsucker, because he let his feelings interfere with his duty. He failed to warn her to avoid fairies at all cost. He is willing to die (except that he is already dead), to save his beloved who insists she must combat the dreaded death fairy.

THE MIDNIGHT WORK is a fabulous paranormal tale in which there is an entirely different ethos system is in play. Killing humans for supper is acceptable as most of species vampire see them as cattle. Once converted, Sophie understands this as she needs to dine too. Other supernatural occurrences darken this eerie world as Kassandra Sims provides a lighthearted yet dark humorous tale.

Harriet Klausner

When he/she bought this book????? The characters were flat,the prose boring, the dialogue banal, and the copy editing unprofessional. This is supposed to be one of TOR's new romance line of paranormals? How so? The hero and herione were little more than sociopaths looking to use each other for sex and mayhem. If i could have given it zero stars,I would have. I couldn't finish it. It had no redeeming value, except maybe to be used as paper to start a fire.

Very disappointing - I love vampire/paranormal books and working in bookstores has exposed me to ALOT of authors in this genre. This book was disjointed, lacked explanations, and developed no sense of concern in me, the reader, about the outcome or the characters. The heroine, having been turned vampire, jumps right in to the killing with brief moments of remorse and few caring feelings for the hero. The hero gave me no feeling of love for the heroine beyond sex and she is the reincarnation of his love from centuries ago. If anything the relationship was apathetic with little interaction between the two. The psychotic supporting character who is best friends with the heroine was sociopathic and filled me with nothing except curiousity of what the author thought she was doing. When I finished the book I was disgusted with the story and felt there had to be entire sections cut out by editors because otherwise I would have blame the author for a poor story. Sims' writing is technically good - its the story that sucks. I read the whole book because I couldn't believe it wouldn't go anywhere with the decent writing from the author. I actually did what I have never done before to any book - I threw the book away. If/when the author gets published again I would hope to see more character development, less disjointed stories, and gaining more sympathy or fellow feeling from the reader. Unfortunately my first experience gives me no incentive to try further books.

This book had a lot of promise and from the synopsis alone I pre-ordered it but now I wish I had waited until it was released and I had read some actual reader reviews before buying, as I probably would not have as several reviewers brought up things that would have made me leery. The prologue itself was interesting and made me think this book had good potential but the first chapter fell apart as soon as we are introduced to Sophie who quickly proved to be a very shallow and one-dimensional character so vaguely sketched out as to be nearly non-existent. From then on this haphazardly written book moves from one plot element to another in a random and frankly annoying meandering fashion that left me extremely unsatisfied. I normally read a book in about 2-3 hours, not scanning but actually reading every word as I read very quickly but I started reading this book over a week ago and am still only two-thirds the way through it as I just cannot force myself to stay interested enough to finish it. The whole book so far feels like pieces of scribbled ideas pasted together in a disordered fashion with no real thought behind where the idea came from or where they ultimately are going. None of the characters so far have any depth to them that makes you even vaguely interested in them and the plot is so confusing that it leaves you shaking your head. Is this a romance? No. If this a fantasy (or even horror)? Not really. Is this a very rough first draft of a yet-to-be-determined genre? Yep. The big baddie so far is about as impressive as a dead cockroach. The love story isn't. The sex scenes are mediocre and the "sexual tension" is completely unbelievable. Our hero is as shallow as our heroine and they both suffer from being rather wimpy and whiny. The "supporting" characters can't support themselves let alone the main characters and the various insipid subplots just add to the feeling that I am somehow reading a very rough draft of some freshman high school play that was thought up while waiting in the oh-so-stimulating atmosphere of a line at the DMV. I would like to give the author the benefit of the doubt and hope that future books will be better but lack of character and plot depth give me little hope in that respect.

This book had a good overall concept with possibly the worst execution. It also seems the editor was pretty much asleep at the wheel with typos like neat instead of next, misspellings and at times even the wrong names.
Mostly 300+ pages of incoherent ramblings and repetition with too little dialogue and too many elements mixed in. From Christmas, to fairies, to trolls, to zombies, to reincarnation, to religious cults, to lesbians, to African-Americans, to Asians, etc... It was just like the author did a search of trendy topics and inserted them in the book with little regard for proper storytelling.
And for the record, this reader does not mind if vampires kill people, just as long as it makes sense.
Character development is nil. In fact, the main character devolves from a confident, vegan, supposedly intelligent PhD candidate, who is liked by friends and colleagues to a whiny, tween-eating, chain-smoking, insecure vampire who thinks like a bipolar (but hey, she looks hot!).
Then there's the alpha male who is never around and reads like an omega, especially since the author feels the need to tell us over and over again he is used to following orders from women.
Unsurprisingly, the main relationship goes the way of the rest of the book. I don't mind if there's more action than romance, but I'd at least like to read about why these two people think they can spend an eternity together other than sex.
The book concludes in what is basically a non-ending. Can't even be called a cliffhanger given that it felt more like the author had completed the requisite number of words and decided to call it a day.
Also, since when is an epilogue some non sequitur you tack on as an afterthought instead of what you write after the actual ending of a book to bring readers some closure?