Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

I started P.N. Elrod's Lifeblood on Monday on the grounds that it was really short, and finished it Friday night in my post-NITA-collapse. [*] This is the sequel to Bloodlist and the second in the Vampire Files series.

Fellow readers, I ask you: does Jack get the crap beat out of him in every book in this series? I know this is a noir-homage kind of series, but if it's a homage to that kind of story, then I'd like to know so I can avoid them unless I'm in the mood for something fairly dark.

Other than that, it was a perfectly good short read. By rights it should have been even shorter than it is, since as far as I can tell, the first two chapters don't actually have anything to do with the plot (in which vampire hunters come after Jack, and Jack's past comes back to haunt him). I am interested whether the author has a grand theory of the workings of vampires; some of the characters have been discussing how, for instance, a creature with no heartbeat can live on blood, and if eventually they're going to come up with a theory, that might be fun to read about.

[*] NITA is the National Institute for Trial Advocacy; I went to a four-day training of theirs (sort of; it was run in-house but with their materials and one of their people leading the training) on, well, trial advocacy this week. It was very intense, a hell of a lot of work, and really draining. I do feel I learnt a lot, though I can't say I cared for the way the program was set up. Don't let TV and movies fool you—doing this kind of stuff the right way is damn hard and requires overcoming a lot of instincts you don't even realize you have.