- Smith, L. Neil.
Sweeter than Wine.
Rockville, MD: Phoenix Pick, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-60450-483-5.
-
A couple of weeks after D-Day, Second Lieutenant J Gifford found
himself separated from his unit and alone in a small French village which,
minutes later, was overrun by Germans. Not wishing to spend the rest of the
war as a POW, he took refuge in an abandoned house, hiding out
in the wine cellar to escape capture until the Allies took the village. There,
in the dark, dank cellar, he encounters Surica, a young woman also hiding from the
Germans—and the most attractive woman he has ever seen. Nature
takes its course, repeatedly.
By the time the Germans are driven out by the Allied advance, Gifford
has begun to notice changes in himself. He can see in the dark. His
hearing is preternaturally sensitive. His canine teeth are growing.
He cannot tolerate sunlight. And he has a thirst for blood.
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, Gifford has established
himself as a private investigator in the town of New Prospect, Colorado,
near Denver. He is talented in his profession, considered rigorously
ethical, and has a good working relationship with the local police. Apart
from the whole business about not going out in daytime without extensive
precautions, being a vampire has its advantages in the gumshoe game: he
never falls ill, recovers quickly even from severe injuries, doesn't age,
has extraordinary vision and hearing, and has a Jedi-like power of suggestion
over the minds of people which extends to causing them to selectively forget
things.
But how can a vampire, who requires human blood to survive, be ethical?
That is the conundrum Gifford has had to face ever since that day in the
wine cellar in France and, given the prospect of immortality, will have to
cope with for all eternity. As the novel develops, we learn how he has
met this challenge.
Meanwhile, Gifford's friends and business associates, some of whom
know or suspect his nature, have been receiving queries which seem to
indicate someone is on to him and trying to dig up evidence against
him. At the same time, a series of vicious murders, all seemingly
unrelated except for their victims having all been drained of blood, are
being committed, starting in Charleston, South Carolina and proceeding
westward across the U.S.
These threads converge into a tense conflict pitting Gifford's ethics
against the amoral ferocity of an Old One (and you will learn just how
Old in chapter 26, in one of the scariest lines I've encountered in
any vampire tale).
I'm not usually much interested in vampire or zombie stories because they
are just so implausible, except as a metaphor for something else. Here,
however, the author develops a believable explanation of the vampire phenomenon
which invokes nothing supernatural. Sure, there aren't really
vampires, but if there were this is probably how it would work. As
with all of the author's fiction, there are many funny passages and turns of
phrase. For a novel about a vampire detective and a serial killer, the
tone is light and the characters engaging, with a romance interwoven with
the mystery and action. L. Neil Smith wrote this book in one month: November, 2009,
as part of the
National Novel Writing Month, but other than
being relatively short (150 pages), there's nothing about it which
seems rushed; the plotting is intricate, the characters well-developed,
and detail is abundant.
October 2015 