The Blood that Bonds by Christopher Buecheler

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Two is trapped: hooked on heroin, held as property, forced to sell her body to feed the addiction. Time brings her ever closer to what seems an inevitable death and Two waits, uncaring, longing only for the next fix.
That’s when Theroen arrives, beckoning to his Ferrari and grinning his inscrutable grin. He is handsome. Confident. Eager to help lift her out of the life that’s grinding her down.
The only problem? Theroen is a vampire.
His blood can cure her addiction, grant her powers she has never had, change her forever into something greater than she was. But when he sinks his teeth into her neck, Theroen also thrusts Two into a world of danger, violence, madness and despair. The powerful, twisted elder Abraham will use her arrival to shatter the uneasy peace that exists in his mansion, bringing an end to the dark game he has been playing for centuries.
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A mixture of True Blood and Twilight with a dash of something new.

I quite liked this book for what it is. It brings the horror and brutality from True Blood and it brings the sparkle (indirectly) and the romance from Twilight. Buecheler also manages to add in just enough of his own to make it his creation and make it into something quite credible. His vampires and their stories, the different breeds, the way of transformation and even returning to human state was very interesting and refreshingly  new.

The Blood that Bonds is, overall, well-written and I enjoyed it, but the romance, the undying love, is to me incredibly annoying as there is never any basis for why. We are never told why the two main characters love each other with such passion. Having never met before, he kidnaps her and boom, eternal love.

The book however also contains more than its share of typos, errors and inconsistencies, which disrupted the flow several times and when debating whether or not to give it 3 or 4 stars, these annoyances pulled it down to 3.

265 pages (ePub) / published in 2009
Review by Iben Jakobsen, BoB, 2011