Azrael starts off the action reflecting on her “friendships” with Morty and Bliss and how dear they are to her. It’s four paragraphs of tell-don’t-show that don’t do anything to advance the plot and don’t match what we’ve been shown. Writing suggestion: you do not want this much fat in your dramatic climax chapter. You want to trim it down to the lean meat of the action and stop worrying about making a word count. The time for padding was in those sex scenes where the writer just couldn’t bear to write anything that wasn’t a quickie. Just a little commercial here: if you like hot sex scenes and don’t mind historical information in a book, Bertrice Small blows anything and everything Lori Foster has done in this series off the damn map.
So she tells Morty not to do anything, just like she always does, and confirms the guy with the gun is Whit, telling him how brave Morty is. Yeah, ever since he murdered a woman and covered for the eight murders he knew Azrael committed, he’s an alpha male and worthy of respect. This line of thinking is so diseased I won’t even discuss it anymore.
And now we get her twenty-first and hopefully last superpower: she can flat-out read minds now. Not just “sense intentions,” but telepathy. Hope she didn’t break her arm from that reach into her ass for this superpower.
There’s some would-be tension where Azrael tries to figure out who’s the most immediate danger and pulls her knife out of the cabinet it hit when she missed her father. Might have been better not to miss, since you’ve never missed with a knife in this series, but a woman can’t be allowed to kill her father. Only the man who took her virginity can do that.
Fabian doesn’t have a problem with her being armed, so she also gets her stupidity from the paternal side. Azrael spends five paragraphs thinking about how much she wanted a family when she was young and how she doesn’t care anymore, presumably because she now has one, with her abusive lover and her kidnapped children. Any relationship her mother had with her father, no matter how brief and painful, had to be healthier than this.
Azrael starts wondering if Ann had a chance to talk to Morty before he got abducted. That reminds me—where is Ann? I thought the whole reason they left her outside on watch is because she could see everything that happened inside the tattoo shop through that big old front window, but I guess not. She later thinks Ann would only come in if “there was some kind of ruckus.” Do you get the feeling this plan was doomed to failure from the start?
Azrael tries to comfort Bliss, who’s “sobbing” because she’s a worthless female, like every female except her bestest-ever BFF Azrael, and Fabian proves he’d been infected with the Victorian-melodrama-villain-dialogue virus.
“Enough. These meager beings are nothing to you, Gaby. Less than nothing…But you, my dear daughter, you are divine.”
So Azrael doesn’t get the movie-Buffy monster cramps, which should mean that Fabian isn’t a demon and she doesn’t have a mandate to murder him, but she’s ignored her godly mandate for two and a half books now and nothing’s happened to punish her for it, so I doubt if that will change in the eleven pages that are left of this chapter.
Fabian’s pitching the “join me and we can rule” plan again and she doesn’t completely shut him down because she’s looking for a chance to kill him as he spouts a lot more Victorian-melodrama dialogue that I’m not going to bother quoting. He does some expositing about his plans and tells her Malinal was going to be the main ingredient in his child etouffee.
By the way, where are Fabian’s droogies? He’s using Whit and Mud because he knows Whit’s mad that Azrael beat his brother into a coma and he may die (notwithstanding the writer being careful to make the cause of his coma an infection to deflect blame for her psychopathic heroine) and Mud’s just violent, but he had some followers left. Out of the original six, he murdered Georgie, Plump Attractive Woman died, and Shari’s strapped to a bed in a “fleabag motel,” but he would still have three left, even though none of them had names. What happened to them? The writer probably forgot they existed, but she did remember a plot hole about how Fabian knew where the kidnapped girls were and takes the time to plug it.
O me of little faith. Fabian’s droogies are in the Storage Room of Evil in the back of the tattoo shop. It’s called out as small and there are three droogies (two men and a woman), Whit, Mud, Dacia, Malinal, Morty, Bliss, Wesley, Azrael, and Fabian. So twelve people in a small room. How are they even moving? It must be like being in an elevator, but the writer doesn’t care so why should we? Azrael knows he got them high to overcome their “scruples” about killing children but doesn’t give a shit as usual.
Then we find out Fabian murdered Shari as punishment and harvested her blood in a big metal tub so he and his daughter can bathe in it. Well, now we know the author’s heard of Elizabeth Bathory. Again, how can anyone take a step in this “small” room without running into each other or this tub that’s big enough for a human to bathe in?
Wesley takes him to task for what happened to Plump Attractive Woman, which might have more impact if he’d given enough of a damn about her to find out her name. Whenever anyone tells Lori Foster to name a character, she must screech like a vampire that just saw a cross and run for cover. Azrael lies about the police finding some vials with fingerprints in the burned-down house, which bothers the three remaining droogies but Fabian somehow knows she’s lying.
He starts reminiscing about Shari and takes the caps off his canines so he can prematurely exult over his own evil. Azrael won’t get in the tub, which couldn’t be liquid blood anymore unless they killed Shari like five minutes ago. Really, if it was any longer than that, the blood would be just a jellied clotted mass of disgustingness. He’s amused by her contrariness (that makes one of us) and tells Mud to bring Malinal. Azrael warns him that she’ll kill him, he believes it but still gets the child, and has to walk close enough to Azrael to buy her knife blade through the eye. And what the hell did Fabian expect to happen, anyway, in this small room? He has poor spatial skills.
Azrael Murder Count: 13
So Malinal runs back to Dacia and Bliss and, since we haven’t had any internalized misogyny in a while, they were “shrieking through their gags, hysterical as only females could be.”
I wish Fabian had decided to make etouffee of his daughter. It really would be the best thing for everyone concerned, even though she’s so skinny the meat would be all stringy and tough, just like her.
So she looks at Whit and he’s smart enough to try shooting her. Of course, since Lori Foster is God, the gun jams. She stabs him in the chest and does some kicking once he’s down. You know, he was the only one with a relatable motivation in the entire scene: he wanted revenge on the bitch who almost killed his brother. Never mind, keep moving, I’m almost free of the Painbringer series! I can see a sliver of light!
Azrael Murder Count: 14
Wesley’s busy indulging his own bloodlust by hitting the droogie woman while dealing nonviolently with the men (from the text—no violence against them is detailed), and Morty’s trying to keep the kidnapped girls out of the way. Presumably Bliss, as a helpless hysterical female, is still screaming. Why didn’t Ann hear all that shrieking from before? Of course none of them think to get Whit’s gun. Nobody except Fabian, that is.
He fires a shot into the ceiling because he’s seen too many movies that used that tactic to reestablish order. Azrael has an uncharacteristically sensible thought that Ann will notice the gunshot. One would hope. She wants to kill him, he threatens to shoot Wesley a bunch more times than the gun has bullets but nobody notices that, and she puts her knife back into the sheath when he tells her to drop it. He should have shot her right in the head for that but of course doesn’t because the writer has put plot armor on her monster in order to get her to her stomach-turning happy ending.
Anyway. Fabian’s insisting she get into the tub, drink the blood, and bathe in it because then she’ll get the wendigo effect and be converted to “vampirism.” I thought you said she was a psychic vampire, and psychic vampires feed off emotional states like pain and fear and death, not blood. I think your theology needs work, along with the theology of this series. But the writer’s almost done with the book so fuck that noise.
From what we’re told, the blood is way fresher than it ought to be. Wesley tells her not to, and Azrael confesses her sick depraved love for her abuser and steps into the Blood Tub and the blood’s still warm, which is utter bullshit, but moving on because there are less than half a dozen pages left in this chapter.
Dacia tries to run to her but Wesley grabs her. Wasn’t she tied up? Somehow they had the forethought to gag the girls and tie their hands, but left their feet free. This is the same stupid thing that saved Azrael at the end of Acceptance. Foster is so repetitious and unimaginative.
Now we get our big show-stopping action scene, which is just as stupid as I expected it to be. I can’t wait to read a good book again. I hope I don’t get the bends.
Azrael pleads finickiness and won’t drink out of the tub, preferring a fresh vein from Shari’s poor murdered corpse. Fabian doesn’t want her doing this but won’t actually stop her, so she pulls the chain that Shari is suspended by out of the ceiling and whips it into Fabian’s head. With all that “omnipotent strength” she has, that should have killed him, but we still have four pages to go so he’s just stunned enough to drop Malinal and the gun. The cliché, it burns!
Then she takes down Shari and put her in the tub with some sanctimony about how “this pathetic girl hadn’t deserved such a death.” What makes her different from Dory? Sanctimonious pastor’s future wife. Doesn’t God have some lightning he can hit her evil ass with?
So Wesley “fetched Fabian’s gun,” which is actually Whit’s and the verb fetched doesn’t convey the urgency you might want. The droogies wilt in the face of his godlike masculinity and Azrael takes stock of the psychic damage everyone’s taken here and being hurt by their pain.
Since nobody bothered to keep an eye on Fabian or restrain him in any way, in keeping with the general intelligence level of the non-villain characters, he went over to his filing cabinet, opened a drawer, and got another gun out, which is now pointed at Azrael. This is actually pretty funny because not only did nobody try to stop this, they didn’t even notice any of the steps he took to wind up with that gun in his hand pointed at her head.
Fabian has the traditional, “I won’t go to jail” speech, evincing the same kind of attitude toward imprisonment that his daughter has. They’re so much alike it could prove nature over nurture. He curses her to hell but not with the inventiveness I’ve had when trying to get through the writing of many a post. “Burn in hell everlasting and may the devil fuck you to death” was my favorite.
Anyway, she’s talking to him when Wesley shoots him in the forehead and looks “defiant, and satisfied.” Better rinse out your tighty-whities in the bathroom sink, Wesley, before the other cops get here–it might cause gossip. Azrael tells him he didn’t need to do that and he tells her he loves her. It reminds me of a moment in Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters, where the hero and heroine are in a situation where they’re about to die and he turns to her with an unmotivated confession of love. It was pretty funny in the movie. Here it has no impact. It has more impact when she thinks of him as “by-the-book supercop,” which indicates she hasn’t been paying attention when she has to instruct him in how to do basic policework. And indicates that Lori Foster doesn’t know what “by-the-book” means. Wesley’s been consistent in avoiding policework and committing unpunished crimes. That’s not “by the book” by anyone’s standards.
He tells her he loves her twice more and she does a 180 from thinking he didn’t need to do that to thinking her father “needed killing.” Again, like father, like daughter.
Wesley frames killing her father as sparing her from doing it herself and she decides that’s because he loves her. Are we done yet? I don’t have much more strength left.
Ann arrives right after the nick of time because women be useless, amirite? She says she called it in and cops are on the way. That would have been a better thing to do ten minutes ago, but whatever. She unties the kidnapped girls—wait a minute. They were gagged and their hands were tied, but there’s a delay in them going to Azrael that indicates their legs were tied too. Lori Foster, you magnificent hack! I read your books!
Then she starts musing over what a “powerful, altruistic, amazing man” Wesley is, and I am so fucking tired of Azrael furiously flicking her bean about how wonderful her abuser is. And you know she’ll still think it when he fractures Dacia’s skull when she refuses to be a proper demure female someday in the not-too-distant future. The rest of the page is just utter shit and ends with Wesley and Azrael and Dacia and Malinal all walking out of the shop as a family. Puke.
And—chapter! All we have left is the epilogue, which is three and a half pages so I think I can get through that with a minimum of Wesleyesque fury, and I don’t have the investment in the Back in Black excerpt. I’m just interested in seeing what characteristics it shares with this series, if any. It’s just nine pages anyway, so the next post will be a double feature and after that I’m going straight into Ungrateful Dead: Murder at the Fillmore, which is the first book in Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s Rock and Roll Murders: Rennie Stride Mysteries. You can say a lot about Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, but she was a much better technical writer than Lori Foster.
Next time, the epilogue, in which the loose plot ends gets tied up and Ultrasonic Carousel vomits, and the first nine pages of Back in Black.
Ultrasonic Carousel 