“Amaury’s Hellion” by Tina Folsom

I finally found the time to read Tina Folsom’s book, “Amaury’s Hellion.” This book is the second installment to her Scanguards Vampires series. As I told Ms. Folsom after I had read her first book, “Samson’s Lovely Mortal,” I became fascinated with Amaury and really wanted to read more about him. When she told me that book two was all about him, I was ready to go.

Amaury LeSang is a vampire and part owner of Scanguards with his good friend Samson. He has a problem though. Amaury was cursed to feel everybody’s emotions. Now I used to think it would be really cool to be able to read another’s mind or, perhaps feel another’s emotions…but not at all like Amaury. His curse manifested in a constant migraine that could only be relieved through sex. At best, the sex would lift the pain only for about an hour. After that, he would get a rush of everyone’s emotions all over again and the migraine would resume.

As Scanguards is under the magnifying glass for murder/suicides allegedly caused by employees, Amaury, Samson, and the New York vampires put their wits together to figure out who-done-it. That is when Amaury meets the feisty human woman, Nina, who is out for vengeance for the death of her little brother. Of course, Nina’s blood boils for Amaury because she believes Amaury is the responsible one for her brother, Eddie’s death.

Amaury’s and Nina’s first meeting turns out to be more of surprise. Instead of killing Amaury as planned, Nina ends up kissing him. Of course, she’s trying to throw off his guard… and it does! Amaury realizes that in Nina’s presence, all his pain vanishes…and they haven’t had sex yet! With a cure seemingly within his reach, Amaury strives to hook up with Nina.

The story is an exciting love story with a touch of dom/sub flavor. Yes, Amaury doles out the spankings and Nina enjoys tying him up.

I must say that over all I loved this story. Amaury is a very caring vampire and loves Nina right off the bat and he’ll do anything to keep her safe. The story seemed well developed and easy to follow all the main characters. However, I did find some sections tended to go a little slow. Perhaps it was my desire to want more detail throughout the story. I would have loved to have read a little more of the dom/sub flavor.

Aside from my specific desires, and I know I’m tremendously finicky, Ms. Folsom has done another great job of carrying on the Scanguards Vampire series. I look forward to the third installation, “Gabriel’s Mate.”

"Ninja's Creed" (Movie)

Tonight I watched a movie I wish I hadn't. I really should have read the reviews first before watching this movie. The title is very misleading. It is called, "Ninja's Creed" & is rated PG-13.

In the beginning, even though it was clearly a low budget movie, I found it enjoyable. So much so that I searched the Internet to find out what book it was based on so I could read it. The only tidbit I found was another name the story had, which was "Royal Kill." The producer should have kept that name, then it would have made a little more sense.

This movie was very convoluted. At first you follow the movie where a warrior is sanctioned by a dying king to protect one of his daughters who was shuffled off to America to be raised by an "American Guardian." The movie timeline takes leaps where you are not sure how to connect the dots. You see the warrior supposedly locating the "princess" but not shown how. It's as if magically he knew where to go. You are shown a cold callous assassin who seemingly has some sort of martial arts training or some kind of mystical upbringing. The assassin apparently finds this "princess" at the same time our warrior does which again you are not offered a means to know how she found her target.

The "princess" is a scared shitless young teenage girl who doesn't know anything of her past. She is drug into this fiasco, led to believe that she may in fact be a princess, and begins to trust the warrior. She does what he says and hides whilst he turns to end the battle with the would-be assassin who mysteriously appears everywhere the warrior and girl go.

A sword fight begins between warrior and assassin... or so you are lead to believe. When the warrior finally slays the assassin, this is the point where everything goes off into right field and you haven't a clue what's happening.

Somehow, the assassin's dead body disappears and mystically becomes the warrior. There is some kind of magical osmosis that occurs binding the two into one thus apparently joining good with evil. Because this teen girl now trusts this warrior, she chooses not to run away. Stupid girl. Now the warrior turns on the girl (because the assassin is now inside the warrior) and he attacks and kills the girl.

Throughout the rest of this movie, you see the warrior struggle to only realize that he is just so joe who leads a boring life as a guard at a museum. Toward the end all I could understand was this man was no warrior at all but a psychopath who builds himself up to be something more than what he is, then looks for some teenage girl to live out his fantasy only to end up killing everyone around.

The music throughout the movie seemed more than it needed to be too. In fact, the music seemed too much for the whole movie. It gives the feeling that something big was going to happen and then nothing does.

This was really a stupid movie and a waste of 90 minutes that I will never get back. Why did I reserve this peace of garbage?