Danielle Page (photographer) | humanitysdarkerside

Demon Isle — Photographer: Danielle Page
Cover design: Rachel Humphrey-D’Aigle

Rachel Humphrey-D’Aigle. Now, there is a proper author’s name – at least in my head.

I love this cover. I agree with Humphrey-D’Aigle that Danielle Page is a great photographer and Rachel has done a cool job with the colors and fonts.

I think Bloodsucker Bay would be considered a novella as it is only 73 pages and 4 chapters long. It is definitely part of a serial as the ending leaves the reader hanging in loose air.

Bloodsucker Bay is a mystery – dead body and all. The thing about Demon Isle is that most of the inhabitants know of the weirdness of both the Howard family and the Isle itself. When a dead body turns up the Sheriff uses the Howard family as much as she can in solving the crime.

For the main part the story is about the Howard siblings and their vampire guardian William. Melinda, Charlie and Michael each have their strong and not so strong sides and we get to share in them. Melinda is a great potion maker and is prescient. One of the reasons William hangs around the witches is that Melinda makes a potion that helps him not bite humans. But he also acts as their guardian while they all try to come to terms with the death of their parents. Melinda feels guilt at not having prevented the death of her parents as her newly developed prescience had warned her of it.

Charlie is a werewolf. That gives him great strength but also urges that get stronger around full-moon. He is the big-brother and suffers from all of the big-brother symptoms.

Michael happens to be the one to feel the full force of Charlie’s big-brotherness. Charlie just cannot let Michael decide on his own what his future is to be. He feels that as fate made Michael a Howard and the Howards traditionally are caretakers of Demon Isle then Michael should just get his act together and do the job. Michael’s witchy side is being a death reader. That means he is very popular with the Sheriff when some unsolvable death occurs on the island.

There were a couple of scenes that I really liked. One was in an underwater cave and involved the brothers. The other was with Emily, Michael’s probable girlfriend. The pace in those two scenes was perfect and the way they were written fun.

Bloodsucker Bay has pretty good potential. Rachel showed the ability to hit the flow and with a little more tightening she could manage to stay there.

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