Title: Once Bitten, Twice Dead

Author: Bianca D'Arc

Publisher: Brava 2010

Genre: Paranormal Romance

Pages: 293

Rating: 2/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Support Your Local Library; May Read and Review; Zombies

So take a contemporary romance (complete with fairly graphic sex scenes) and combine it with a zombie action/adventure... interesting concept.  And yet, I felt this story was poorly executed.  I picked this up from the library thinking that a combo of romance and zombies would be fun.  Unfortunately I didn't buy either aspect.

The love story was predictable.  The two main characters hop into a sexual relationship within the first two days of meeting each other.  The characters separately were okay, but nothing so great.  Why is it that every woman in this romance books has had a bad relationship that causes her to hesitate (for a fraction of a second, but in her mind the entire book) getting involved with the male character?  Can we have any other type of female character, please?  And I am so sick of these books ending with the characters telling each other "I love you" and more often than that becoming engaged and/or getting married.  I would like to read a more complicated (and real) relationship.  I want to see two people actually get to know each other.  This is why I love Jane Austen.  Her romances (even being set in the early 1800s) feel more like real relationships than these modern romances.  I sometimes feel that these novels were written solely for the sex scenes.  Sort of like how many people watch porn just for the sex scenes and fast forward through anything that could be called plot.  Is it so hard to have a good story that happens to have a few good sex scenes?  Please someone give me some ideas...

As to the zombie storyline, I felt it was an afterthought.  It was like we needed something to get these two characters together, so how about a mad scientist letting zombies loose?  These zombies are supposedly a laboratory creation with the intent of creating an army.  How many times have I read that story?  Very rarely is it excuted well and that's without a romance plot.  The mad scientist was predictable. The zombie attacks were predictable.  The suspense was nonexisant.  I like my zombie books to be truly disturbng (see Autumn) or lots of fun (see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies trilogy).  Zombies as an afterthought better be prefaced by a great storyline and characters.

This book just didn't catch me at all.  I was bored halfway through, but skimmed through the rest for the action/zombie scenes hoping that somethng would get better.  Nope, pretty disappointing.  Once finishing, I found out that the books is part of a trilogy.  I had picked those up from the library to read, but think I'm going to skip them for something more interest.

If you want to read a good romance/zombie book, pick up Married with Zombies and Flip This Zombie by Jesse Petersen (1-2 of The Living Dead trilogy, 3rd comes out later this year).  David and Sarah are a great real couple who fight their way through the zombie apocaplypse.

Next up: The Forest of Hands and Teeth. Heard great things about this zombie young adult novel, so I bumped it up my reading list.

Guardians of the Dark (DNFed series)

• #1 Half Past Dead (with Zoë Archer)
• #2 Once Bitten, Twice Dead
• #3 "Smoke On The Water" in The Beast Within
• #4 A Darker Shade of Dead
• #5 Dead Alert