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  Underdead by Liz Jasper
Jo Gartner is a pretty 22 year-old redhead who teaches science to 8th graders and lives in sunny Long Beach, California. How lucky can you get, right? (Except for maybe that part about teaching 8th graders …) Well, everyone has issues, and Jo hasn’t been dating much lately. She wouldn’t mind finding Mr. Right – even though her experience has taught her not to date extremely hot guys – and her feisty coworker Becky wants to help her. If nothing else, matchmaking will distract Becky from the dreaded science-department Christmas party at which they sit in bored misery in a trendy Long Beach restaurant. Jo, Becky, and the other science teachers fidget at the table while their toad-like department chair Roger drones on about administrative concerns. Now Becky points out an extremely hot man in black over near the bar. Jo gives in to Becky’s urgings and nervously approaches the man who looks delighted to meet her. His name is Will and he wants to continue their conversation on the back porch where it’s quiet! Heart pounding, she complies. Oh, it’s too good to be true when she finds him to be witty, urbane, and a fan of Jane Austen! Just when she’s thinking that she should marry him, he does something strange: he pulls her close and bites her hard on the neck! Suddenly Jo is in a world of weird. She fights free of Will only to run smack into a concerned gray-eyed man who has followed them outside. Understandably rattled, she pulls away from him and rejoins her coworkers back in the restaurant. But now she’s feeling really strange. She brushes off her friends’ offers to drive her home, and goes outside to call a taxi. Collapsing in the back seat, she gives her address and loses consciousness. Needless to say, she is startled beyond words to wake up in her bedroom, feeling horrible – and then to find the taxi driver sleeping on her living room couch! It’s the gray-eyed man from the restaurant, the one whom she ran into when trying to escape Will. His name is Gavin and he claims to be a graduate student who drives a taxi. Supposedly he stayed the night to watch over her. Jo kicks Gavin out. But her life has already changed forever. It turns out that Will is a vampire. Thanks to Will’s incompetence at trying to “turn” Jo, she too is a vampire – sort of. In the days to come, she will find that she is not so much “undead” as “underdead”: someone with all of the weaknesses of a vampire, and none of the strengths. This becomes obvious with her immediate and horrible allergy to sunlight that threatens to deprive her of her teaching job and turn her life inside-out. Jo has a ray of hope, however: maybe being “underdead” means that she is only on the verge of being a vampire, and she can perhaps reclaim her humanity. Well, she’s going to have even more to cope with than her newly underdead status: someone gets murdered at her school. Even worse, the victim was killed in such a way that suggests a vampire did it. Did a vampire do it? Or does someone know about Jo and is trying to frame her? Jo will have to solve the murder mystery, resist her attraction to the suave Will, avoid Will’s jealous vampire mistress, and learn to work with the mysterious and exasperating Gavin. Yes, in the very best tradition of vampire fiction, Jo finds herself in a love-triangle! I really enjoyed Underdead by Liz Jasper, and I love how books like this are flourishing on the literary scene: daring and flamboyant hybrids of genres like Mystery and Horror and Romance that used to remain primly separate. I say, let them mix, and let gloriously creative and funny stories like this result! Underdead can be found as an eBook at Cerridwen Press through this link: Stay tuned for a paperback release and an Amazon link in the near future. |
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