My ultimate takeaway from this novel is that it was just fine. And that's a shame, because it's a really strong pitch and I really wanted to like it more than I did.

My main problem here is that it's simply oo fast.  The story has no time to breathe, rattling along from scene to scene with very little connective tissue. Time jumps forward weeks and months with no indication that this has happened, and I found myself going back to reread sections to try and get myself situated in the narrative again. Characters make decisions and come to conclusions in the blink of an eye. One of the main characters, and FBI agent named Sloane, learns that vampires are real and is immediately fine with it and mentally prepared to deal with it, without any sense that this is a shock to him. A medical intern who's roped in to help the protagonists harvest organs from vampires witnesses her friends cutting open a live vampire and pulling out its insides in the back of a car and doesn't even flinch before she's asking if she can get wrist-deep in the much. And while all of this is going on the point of view jumps between characters without warning, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph, in a way that's very jarring.

Something I find that happens in books like this, where I really wanted to love it and end up just thinking it's okay, is that I grow increasingly critical of tiny, trivial details that don't really matter on their own but that add up to a growing sense of disillusionment with the work. One is the aforementioned speed with which characters react to their world being turned upside down. Others were small things about the world and the 'rules' of vampirism that didn't really add up. A big plot point is that characters throw things for vampires to count as a distraction - bags of rice, tongue depressers, etc. But on multiple occasions vampires break through windows to attack people or gain access to locations. Why are they not compelled to stop and count the shards of broken glass on the floor before continuining? Why does this counting thing only work some of the time? Another peeve - a couple of our protagonists are vampires, and they're capable of resisting the urge to feed. Why are they able to retain their humanity but none of the "bad" vampires are - even those who, we're told, are freshly turned, just like our protagonists? They're not really important issues but they jumped out at me and bothered me while I was reading.

Because of the quick pace the ending just doesn't really land, unfortunately. It builds to a climax but it nevers feels earned. It's just chaos and blood and violence because that's how a vampire story needs to end, right? I feel like this had the potential to reinvent the genre in the same way as something like 30 Days of Night or Blade but it's so rushed that it just falls flat, and that's a shame.

I'm not mad that I read it, but I wanted more from it.