I’d say The Vampire Shrink (Book 1 in the Vampire Psychologist Series) by Lynda Hilburn was pretty entertaining. The main character, Kismet Knight, is a young clinical psychologist who specializes in helping those that believe in all things paranormal. She recently decided to take on a client who believes in vampires. Of course, like anyone else, Kismet herself doesn’t believe in these things, and she often struggles between maintaining her professionalism to analyze their situations scientifically and her internal natural thought process that just wants to knock sense into these people. That is, until she’s thrust into this world herself.
A good deal of the book is spent with Kismet denying that vampire exist, even though all of the strange events add up to it. I guess that could be a realistic response, but it was a little irksome. Though she is a psychiatrist there are times what her inner monologue doesn’t sound very sophisticated at all, especially when it comes to men. That could be intentional due to her lack of experience with many men, or maybe it’s due to her age. She is unusually young for a shrink. It’s also a little hard to believe that she doesn’t get attention for being attractive. She is described as looking like Megan Fox yet when good looking men flirt with her she literally says that this doesn’t happen very often.
We meet some really cool vampires. I like their powers. I’m happy they don’t sparkle. I’m even happier that they have fangs…and boy are they used… Deveraux is sophisticated and enigmatic.
Like many paranormal romances, there is a love triangle. Kismet’s torn between an FBI agent and the vampire Devereux, who takes her as his mate. I’m sure it’s not difficult to determine who I rooted for the whole time, haha.
Normally with these kinds of series I usually don’t like when the main character falls in love with the guy in 10 pages. I don’t connect with that whatsoever as a reader which is why I generally am selective about my paranormal romances. But for some reason, I didn’t mind it in this book. That is probably because there is something special about Kismet and their union was foreshadowed.
The villains are evil and beautiful, evil and ugly, and evil and crazy. I was seriously creeped out in a couple of scenes, but they were well done. Hilburn doesn’t mind exposing the reader to disturbing situations.
This was rewrite but I actually did not notice any major differences aside from newer pop culture references over the past 5 years, so my opinion did not change much from the previous edition (which I also read). Towards the end it really picks up and gets very intense and engaging so I hope to see more of that in future novels all throughout. I’m not quite sure whether or not I’d consider the ending that much of a cliffhanger or not. At least it helps that you can easily move onto the next book and see what happens next. I know I will.
*ARC provided by the author/publisher*