Undead and Unreturnable by MaryJanice Davidson

From the author's website: Even the undead celebrate Christmas, and Betsy is in heaven shopping for gifts.

But all is not merry in the mansion. It’s become infested with ghosts—really needy ones who have no qualms asking Betsy to run errands for them to rectify their pasts. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose, and, being tall and blonde, Betsy perfectly fits his type.

They say Christmas is a time for friends and family. But with a half-sister who’s the devil’s daughter, an evil stepmother, a fiend living in her basement, and assorted spirits and killers running amok, Betsy is not sure she’ll survive the holidays. Oh, right. She’s already dead…

Blech! I think I need a shower - I feel dirty just for having listened to this. I hated it. I saw it on the shelf at Barnes and Noble and thought it sounded cute and fun but it was awful. I feel somewhat guilty being so mean about someone's work but this is the fourth in a series of EIGHT so I assume MaryJanice Davidson is rolling in money and could not care less what a housewife from the sticks thinks about her book.

The closest I can come to describing it is that it was like someone decided to turn Twilight into a sitcom comedy. It was a series of single episode jokes/situations just strung together without much of an overarching plot. There was a little bit of a mystery but nothing really happened on that front until disk 4 of the 5 and then it had no depth. There was the romance between the two main characters, Betsy the vampire queen and Eric Sinclair, her king. But Eric, the male lead, had zero personality, he was flat, dull and just the anti-thesis of the leading man.

The narrator was Nancy Wu and she did an alright job with some of the females but her male voices - oh my, bad, bad, bad. And there was so much foul language and vulgar sex. Hearing Nancy Wu use the bad words and read the sex scenes - ewww!

The bright spot was some good one-liners - I got the occasional laugh. And, Davidson must churn these out pretty quickly because despite the fact that this was book four and she's on number eight now, some of the cultural references and slang were still fresh.

I'm really curious who is buying and reading these books. They must sell or she wouldn't have had so many of them published. I may nose around the blogs of people doing the Vampire Challenge and see what I can find out!

This is one of my books for the 2009 Audio book Challenge. 12/12 completed on that one - my first challenge completed in 2009! Click on the button to see what else I listened too!






This book is my "U" for the A-Z Reading Challenge! Click on the logo to see my progress.






and this one too...
This is on my list for the Spring Reading Thing 2009. Click on the logo to see the rest of my list.