Novel Review: Undead and Unemployed (Undead, #2) by MaryJanice Davidson

Genre: Adult Paranormal Romance

Rating (Out of 5): ~3.5

Publisher: Penguin (Berkley Sensation)

Spoilers?: Yes.

Goodreads Synopsis:

 Nothing can make Betsy Taylor give up her shoe fetish - even dying and rising as the new Queen of the Vampires. Being royally undead isn't all it's cracked up to be - there are still bills to be paid. And Betsy is determined to live as normally as possible, even if it means getting a job. A "feet" she accomplishes with panache, landing her dream job selling designer shoes at Macy's.

Things couldn't be better - except for her new friends, who keep pestering her while she's on the clock. As if she has time to socialize when there are deliciously sinful shoes to try on - and buy at a discount. It seems that vampires are being murdered in St. Paul, and they're all clamoring for Betsy to do something about it. The worse part is she's going to have to enlist the help of the one vamp who makes her blood boil: the oh-so-sexy Sinclair. Now, she's really treading on dangerous ground - high heels and all...

Review:

I really enjoy Davidson’s books, her style of writing, her characters, and I just seem to eat up her books rather fast. This one, for example, I read in one night, not even meaning to. She has really fast, random-ish dialogue, in a bit of a Gilmore Girls way. Sometimes that’s hard to pull off, and I’m not going to say that Davidson does it amazingly, but she does do it rather well. And in a way that pulls me right in.

Her main characters, at least Betsy and Fred the Mermaid, seem to be rather alike, but that doesn’t bother me too much. And while I think I like Fred more than this series, I am rather enjoying this one. The first book was just good, about a 3 star, but this one was really good. It’s kicking it up, I guess.

I didn’t review the first book, which was a bit of an oversight on my part, but in that one, Betsy turns into a vampire, and ends up being the Queen of them, says The Book of the Dead, because a lot of normal vampire killing things don’t work on her, even though she’s new and still young. She ignores most rules and tells her best friend and her family, and even makes another human friend, that she’s a vampire. And by the end of the book, she has killed the King and is trying to not like Sinclair, who she inadvertently made her King by sleeping with him.

This book starts three months later, when Betsy decides that she needs to get a job. Her best friend, Jessica, is rich and paying for most everything, even though Betsy doesn’t want her to. She’s living with Marc, who’s her male best friend and gay, and then Marc and Jessica decide that they need to all live together in a bigger house when their current one gets termites, so they buy a mansion. Betsy, who is obsessed with shoes, gets a job in Macy’s shoe department. Then she finds out that some people are killing vampires, and they attack her vampire friend Tina. Then they attack her, then she ends up being friends with them, kind of, and figures out that they were only being used by some other vampire out to take her place, and it was surprisingly easy to get to her.

By the end of the book, she’s contemplating her feelings for Eric, who, along with Tina and maybe some other people?, have moved in with her. She’s discovered that most vampires do not accept her as their queen, she can see ghosts, she doesn’t have a job anymore, although I don’t see why she needs one. Apparently, whenever you kill a vampire, and she’s killed three, you get all their stuff. Surely that comes with money, especially when one of them owns several businesses all over the world.

Now, that’s all I’m going to say about the events, because I have given enough away.

I enjoyed this book more than the first one, and already have the next one waiting for me, so I plan to get to it soon. Very soon, hopefully. Being the romance junkie that I am, I'm hoping there will be more romance, more Sinclair, in the next one.