Second Sunrise: A Lee Nez Novel (Lee Nez Novels) [Hardcover]

Second Sunrise is a new serial by the Thurlo team. They have over 30 books to their credit. I am not sure what happened here.

Second Sunrise begins on a dark night in the secluded hills of Fort Wingate, New Mexico, when state patrolman Lee Nez's life is forever altered. Lee and his rookie partner Benny interrupt a military ambush massacre. Benny is murdered and Lee is mortally injured. Lee wakes a new man, a nightwalker, which apparently is the Navajo word for vampire.

The story jumps to sixty years later. Lee continues to search for the nightwalker who transformed him and to fend off the skinwalkers who want the immortal properties of his blood. Skinwalker is a term for Navajo witches able to shapeshift into wolves.

Just when you thought that every vampire story had been told, the Thurlos come out with a fresh twist. Second Sunrise is no Dracula and the Thurlos are no Bram Stoker. I love vampire stories. I didn't like this book, at least not as a whole.

There was much about the story that I enjoyed. The supporting character FBI Agent Diane Lopez is strong, confident and can hold her own despite the gravity of the situations in which she finds herself. The premise of Navajo magic and the ancient history behind it and its people is intriguing and well presented, describing cultural cues like finger pointing and waiting outside to be invited in.

Unfortunately, I found the first chapters slow and tedious. From the jacket cover I already knew someone was going to die and that Lee would become a nightwalker. This section took too long to get to the point. Throughout the novel there was a lot of telling going on. Too much time was spent talking about personality traits instead of showing them through actions. This made it difficult to connect with the lead character positively or negatively, therefore there was no emotional involvement with him, his life or his actions.

Second Sunrise was overly repetitive. Benny's death and the young bride and infant son he leaves behind are mentioned four times in the first 83 pages. Totally unnecessary and irritating. The story isn't so involved that the reader wouldn't remember a driving force such as this. There are many other instances of this kind of repetition.

The language reflected this redundancy, with overused phrases, unnecessarily mundane details, and facts pointed out to the reader evident within the scene. All these details make it seem as though readers have short attention spans.

I believe this could have been an exciting addition to the vampire genre. I just think it was released too soon. So much more could have been done with it. It needs to be tidied up. Perhaps it would have helped to have the point of view in first person. If you want to read a different twist on the vampire story then pick this up but if you want a gripping tale with believable characters you can sympathize with and be moved by, this isn't it.

Review Originally Posted at http://www.linearreflections.com

Having enjoyed several of the Ella Clah mysteries by the Thurlos, I had high expectations for Second Sunrise. Those were dashed almost immediately. #1 places the book in the horror genre and it is indeed a horror of clunky narrative, stilted dialogue, and unconvincing plot.

In 1945, Lee Nez, a New Mexico State Policeman of Navajo extraction and his partner come upon a gang of German spies led by a Nazi vampire attacking a military convoy carrying plutonium for the Manhattan Project. Everyone but Nez and the vampire are killed in the ensuing firefight. Nez manages to hide the plutonium before the German vampire turns him into a vampire. Nez goes to a Navajo healer living conveniently nearby and is partially cured of his vampirism. "partially" means he is less strong than a full-blown vampire, but can survive in daylight with a good coat of sunblock. The healer warns him to watch out for skinwalkers -- Navajo shapeshifters -- because they can smell vampires and covet their immortality. So much for prologue.

55 years later, Nez has rejoined the New Mexico State Police in the four corners area as Leonard Hawk. He apparently spent the intervening years exterminating skinwalkers and the odd vampire. He learns that the German vampire has returned, posing as a German airforce pilot in order to recover the plutonium Nez hid for Iraqi terrorists. Lee Hawk's inquiry about the German pilot brings him to the attention of a beautiful, spunky FBI agent. She becomes his ally after they are attacked at his apartment by a pack of skinwalkers in wolf form.

The story ought to be riviting, but it clanks along like the caterpiller tractor that figures in the anticlimactic denouement.

This book tumbled out of my hands and hit the floor about the point that the female FBI Agent and the female Vampire began to insult one another about their respective weights. That has to be a new low in vampire fiction. The other times the book fell out of my hands was because I could no longer keep my eyes open as Nez and Lopez have long pointless conversations with the occasional coy romantic comment. I think that the FBI agent who was killed early in the book got off easily compared to those of us who stayed to the end.

The authors cannot resist hopping on every new bandwagon that goes by, unfortunately they forget to get off the old bandwagons. Therefore, in this book we have a female FBI agent out to avenge her dead partner, skinwalkers (sort of Navaho Werewolves), German vampires, and a Navaho vampire state cop also out to avenge his dead partner (who was killed in 1945). All of the characters are one dimensional at best.

The skinwalkers are inherently evil and hunt vampires for no discernable purpose except the authors needed some action to propel the story to its next stage. The German vampires are equally purposeless except they want to get their hands on a case that might (no one really knows for sure) contain uranium or plutonium or something radioactive-- so much of this book is just two characters who have no facts engaging in fruitless speculation.

Let's not forget the writing. There is a lot of telling and not showing with strange moments of exposition that make me think that the authors had suddenly thought of something they should have mentioned earlier, so they jam it into the conversation whether it feels natural-- if any of the conversation in this book seems natural-- or not.

I think I should say something positive about the book, though. The dust jacket on the hard cover is rather clever and unusual. Shame it couldn't be on a better book.

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