Bite Me, Your Grace by Brooklyn Ann

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Time for another book I found looking specifically for books that would fill open spaces on my Bang in the Night Bingo. Bite Me, Your Grace by Brooklyn Ann is the first book in her Scandals with Bite series. It's a paranormal historical romance series! What's funny is I found this on a list with characters that have pet cats. This not only covers that prompt, but also a shocking twist, bite me and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation for Bang in the Night. I also used this to cover the Fall in Love board 2 prompt published before 2021. I also read this during the Smutathon and it covered the prompts paranormal, vampire, new to you author and supernatural main character.

Angelica is being pushed by her mother to land a titled gentleman for a husband to receive support from her grandfather. All Angelica wants to do is become the next gothic author. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has recently come out and Angelica is a huge fan of her and her mother's writing. Her neighbor Ian, the Duke of Burnrath, lives in the perfect house to fuel Angelica's haunted mansion story. When see sneaks in one day to take a look at the place, she ends up hurting herself. Ian comes to her rescue and Angelica quickly finds that the rumors about Ian being a vampire are in fact, not rumors.

I was pretty excited for this book. I've read quite a few paranormal historical romances and a lot of them tend to be more heavy on the historical than paranormal. This was the complete opposite and I did enjoy that aspect. This was definitely more of a paranormal romance that had a historical setting. This book was touch for me to come to a decision on rating. I was thinking 4-stars, but after finishing and thinking on it for the night I decided to drop it down to 3-stars, maybe 3.5. There was just so much that left me wanting more.

While I can and do enjoy the more bluestocking debutantes, Angelica really bothered me at times. I feel like the information about Mary Shelley and Lord Byron was too much for my liking. A reason why I love historical and paranormal is for the fantastical feelings that evoke. Here it was almost based too much in real history that it kept taking me out of the more paranormal elements. It's kind of hard for me to put into words, but I just felt like a lot of different things fell short. The steamy scenes were okay words wise, but they didn't feel very steamy. I wasn't a fan of so many conflicts between them. Sometimes Angelica made decisions that didn't make sense to me. Yes she's fighting back and wanting to do what she wants, but I feel like in the beginning she at least had some common sense on what was too much. She did the actions anyways, but she at least had moments of guilt for how her actions were going to effect her parents and had second thoughts. Once her and Ian got married, it all went out the window.

Also, I really wanted Ian to confront her grandfather. He was a horrible person and I wish that more was done with him. Angelica's mother was odd. I liked her as an overbearing mama, as much as you can like one of those, but I felt like her opening up to her daughter was too quick and not in the right part of the story. Things like that just felt almost like the author had a checklist of things they wanted to include. There was too much going on and added in. Another thing that we didn't need, the backstory of the vampire hunter. Okay, give us his POV a couple of times to amp up the suspense, but I don't need him reminiscing about how he became a vampire hunter. If he's one of the villains that's just going to be killed (sorry, spoiler), I don't need to really get deep into why he's a vampire hunter. And even then, it seemed like he was just someone pious that had anger issues. There was nothing like a vampire killed his family.

There was some lead up to the next book in the series, and I'm intrigued by some of the other vampires we met, but I don't know if I'm going to continue the series. I like to give authors more than one chance, but if I do pick up more it probably won't be for a bit. I just was let down by the way that things developed. The bones were good and there were some good parts, it just kept falling short in different areas. I know that authors evolve though, so I'm not putting her on my no interest list. We'll see if and when I pick up another one.

Have you read Bite Me, Your Grace?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: Bite Me, Your Grace, Brooklyn Ann, 3-stars, 3 days, eBook, 352 pages, published in 2013