What I'm Reading Now: Moon Dance

I snagged a great Kindle e-book a couple of days ago.

One of the great things about owning a Kindle is the opportunity to browse thousands and thousands of indie and self-published titles.  Now, I'll say up front that most of these books are, to be blunt, crap.  In many cases, there's a reason the authors chose to self-publish, that reason being no publisher on Earth would read past the first paragraph, let alone pony up a small fortune to see the awful thing lurch to life in print.

But they're not all bad.  I can always tell before I'm done reading the second line of the book description, because the same writer who writes that wrote the book.  If it's a confusing, wandering quagmire of cliches and purple prose, I move on.

But there are gems hidden amid the refuse.  One such gem is Moon Dance (Vampire for Hire #1) by J. R. Rain..

It's only 99 cents.  Yeah, I'm a tightwad.  But J. R. Rain should really be asking more than a buck for Moon Dance.

I have a weakness for film-noir private eyes.  I firmly believe the world should be black and white, stuck circa 1940.  Fedoras.  Rainswept streets at midnight.  Dames.

So you're probably thinking Moon Dance is set in a world just like that, right?

Wrong.  The protagonist is a working mom, with two small kids and a lot of laundry.

She's also spent the last six years as a vampire.

So no fedoras.  Rainswept streets, maybe.  But what the book has is the most important thing of all -- it's got the heart and soul of a gritty, unflinching PI novel.

I doff my hat -- a damp fedora, with two bullet holes -- to J. R. Rain, whoever they are, because not only do they know how to write, but they know how to write the stuff I like.

I'll post a full review when I'm done.  Again, that's Moon Dance, by J.R. Rain.