All Hallows Heartbreaker by Delilah Devlin

Love bites! Emmaline Harris meets the perfect man at a Halloween party. After he rescues her from the unwanted attentions of another partygoer, she succumbs to his kisses and spends an evening engaged in wicked-sexy lovemaking. Sure she's just a one-night stand, she tries to exit gracefully, but soon find she needs Dylan's special skills when her world is turned upside down by a blood-drinking killer and his gang who target her for their next meal.

Dylan O'Hara only wants a night of passion to slake his sexual needs, but finds Emmy is a full-bodied, red-blooded siren whose innocence and humor draws this Master vampire like a moth to a red-hot flame. When Emmy attracts the attention of a serial-killing vampire, Dylan vows to protect her, but he fears he'll lose Emmy once she discovers her "Dracula" has real fangs!

A bit of a disappointing read. I hadn't expected stunning literature, but I had thought it would be fairly decent given that I've read other works by Ms. Devlin and have greatly enjoyed them. Silent Knight, which is a least loosely related to this series I believe, is one of my favorite shorts, and I'd hoped this would be much like it. Instead I found myself shaking my head and rolling my eyes a lot at the often stilted dialog, and situations that resolve themselves far too easily, usually by the main characters getting turned on and having sex yet again.



Emmy is rather an annoying character. She runs off at the mouth a bit too much, and tends to babble nonsense most of the time. I get that it's supposed to be part of her character, but the problem to me is that there just isn't much depth to her character. We never really get to know her beyond the fact that she's a chatterbox, has self-image problems because she's got a little bit of padding on her and isn't stick thin, and it doesn't take much for her to get turned on and ready to go at it with Dylan. Repeatedly.

We do get a little bit of insight into Dylan's character, but again not a lot. We learn that he has a conscience, and though he can't help himself where Emmy's concerned it seems, still he is afraid of hurting her. Mostly though we are given just enough about him to make us curious to know more beyond the typical alpha-male posturing he does.

The story does improve toward the end, though it also ends with some major unresolved issues. There is hope that the narrative will get richer in later books in the series, and perhaps we will get to know more about the characters involved. The 3 star rating is, perhaps, a bit generous, but, well, the sex is pretty good, if a teensy bit repetitive at times, and the characters are essentially likeable if not well developed. Not sure if I'd recommend it too much, but you could certainly do worse than this one.

• All Hallows Heartbreaker on Goodreads
• Delilah Devlin's website