Review: Night Rising- by Chris Marie Green

Welcome to Hollywood—after dark…

Stuntwoman Dawn Madison is a girl with a lot of attitude—and a lot of issues, mostly about living up to the legacy of her mother, a world famous movie star/sex symbol, whose death left Dawn to be raised by her dad Frank, nobody’s notion of single-father-of-the-year. Now that she’s all grown up, she and Frank aren’t on the best of terms, to say the least.

Still, he is her dad, and when he vanishes while investigating the bizarre sighting—caught on film—of a supposedly long-dead child star, she comes home to Tinseltown to join the search for him. Working with his colleagues—a psychic short in stature but big in dreams of stardom, a beautiful Latina techno-geek, and the P. I. firm’s never-seen boss—she discovers an erotic and bloody underground society made up of creatures she thought existed only on the screen.

They are devious. They are deadly. And some of them are dangerously attractive…
(Summary from Chris Marie Green's Vampire Babylon website.)

This is the first book in the Vampire Babylon series by Chris Marie Green(aka Crystal Green). Dawn Madison is a bad-girl stuntwoman who had gotten herself into some trouble on her last film, so she was taking a break doing construction. That is until she got a call from one of her father's co-workers, Kiko, telling her that he was missing and that they wanted her help finding him. So now Dawn finds herself in L.A. with Kiko(a little person who is not at all sensitive about his height, just his psychic ability), Breisi(ex-Latin soup-star and tech-wiz), and the mysterious Limpet.

Oh, there's also the mysterious Matt Lonigan, another P.I. who says he's also trying to find her dad. He seems to pop up at the strangest times. Now if Dawn could only focus on trying to figure out more about him instead of how to get him out of his clothes, things might go a little bit better.

As she sets out to find her dad, she takes a job with his strange P.I. agency and involves herself in the last case he was working on. A child star was caught on film even though he died years ago. But how could that be? Next thing Dawn knows she's being attacked by vampires. No, there must be a rational explanation. There's also her boss, who can get into her head, and her body....yet Dawn refuses to face the truth of what's going on. How long can a girl live in denial? You'd be surprised.

While investigating both her dad and the child star, they start to find that there might be more going on here than meets the eye. Though, the reader already knows this because the book goes to another point of view every now and then Below ground where the vampires are and get to find out a little bit more about what's going on. There's a whole other world in the Underground, and it has it's own social structure and rules and everything.

I found this book to be a fairly quick read, with the action pretty evenly spaced throughout the book. Dawn is rather sex-crazed which was very entertaining at times, though this was all fueled by her insecurities about her deceased sex-goddess of a film star mother. She doesn't get along with women at all, though her and Breisi are rather funny together, and she gets along with men a little to well most of the time and ends up wanting to jump them for sex. LOL.

I loved the characters, loved the plot, loved the vampires that you get to read about in the Underground and the whole world that's been built there. All in all, from book one I'm hooked on this series and can't wait to read more! Oh, and I wanna know more about their boss! *swoon*

Vampire Babylon series in order it should be read:
1. Night Rising
2. Midnight Reign
3. Break of Dawn
4. A Drop of Red
5. Path of Razors
6. Deep in the Woods(March 2010)
Check out the Vampire Babylon website to learn more.