Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Kicks off a new "Queen Betsy" comic vampire trilogy, 20 Aug 2008
This comedy vampire thriller is number seven in a series which combines chick lit romantic comedy and vampire thriller - from the viewpoint of the new and particularly incongruous Queen of the Vampires.
Imagine a cross between "Sex and the City" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and you've roughly got the idea.
The plotlines of the first six books were more or less resolved in number six, "Undead and Uneasy" so this book, "Undead and Unworthy," kicks off what Mary Janice Davidson calls a new "story arc" - she also says that this will be a trilogy. The second book in that trilogy, "Undead and unwelcome" is now out, so the full list of Queen Betsy stories to date is
1) Undead and Unwed
2) Undead and Unemployed
3) Undead and Unappreciated
4) Undead and Unreturnable
5) Undead and Unpopular
6) Undead and Uneasy
7) Undead and Unworthy
8) Undead and Unwelcome
There is also a "Queen Betsy" novella in Davidson's book "Dead over Heels" which is a collection of three paranormal romance stories. In my opinion you will get most out of these books if you read them in order: I would start with "Undead and Unwed" and work on from there.
The "Queen Betsy" books are told in the first person by Elizabeth Taylor, who prefers to be called Betsy for obvious reasons. The first words of the series are "The day I died started out bad and got worse in a hurry."
Betsy is a former model and is still a fashion fanatic: at the start of the series, on the morning of her disastrous 30th birthday, she is working as a secretary. Her main interests are designer shoes, designer clothes, and her cat. In quick succession she gets fired, loses her cat, and is killed in a car accident. It is a great surprise to her when she rises again as a most unusual vampire. It is even more of a surprise when, through a sequence of bizarre events, she becomes queen of the vampires.
At the start of this seventh book, the initial chaos which results from Betsy's accession to the Vampire Throne appears to have died down. But then, in quick succession,
* Betsy's ghastly and recently-deceased stepmother Antonia (who she thinks of as "the Ant") starts haunting her
* Local detective Nick Berry, who is also the boyfriend of Betsy's best friend Jessica, asks Betsy for some discreet help in solving the horrible murders of a number of gangsters. He suspects that a rogue element of the police force has found a way to get rid of local criminals without the tedious business of gathering evidence or attending court by paying a vampire or fiend to murder them.
* Betsy and her friends are attacked by a pack of ungrateful fiends.
There will be a lot of confusing and amusing shenanagans before all this is sorted out ...
Mary Davidson has great fun by mixing up the vampire genre as in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or Laurell Hamilton's "Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter" series and Chick-Lit romantic comedy as in "Sex and the City." This series is way over the top, fairly sexy, and usually very funny.
An interesting comparison with other authors who have written entertaining comedies by combining incongruous genres would be with Marianne Mancusi and Robert Frezza.
In the same way that this book gets plenty of laughs by combining chick lit with Vampires, Frezza write two very funny books which combined Vampires and Science Fiction ("McLendon's Syndrome" and "The VMR Theory") and Mancusi combined chick lit with time travel in "A Connecticut Fashionista at King Arthur's Court" and "A Hoboken Hipster in Sherwood Forest." Anyone who likes this book is likely to enjoy all four of those, and vice versa, if you have read and enjoyed any of those books you will probably like this one.
OK, this is never going to win the Booker Prize or any other great award for classic literature, and it is fairly raunchy, so not suitable for children. However, if you have the right sort of sense of humour, it is good fun. I can recommend "Undead and Unworthy" and also enjoyed reading the rest of the series.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
hilarious, 11 Feb 2009
betsy is adjusting to married life and being a parent to her baby bro. so when life becomes quiet some disaster occurs to shake her world. his time her dead stepmother "the ant" appears to her as a ghost. also the fiends from the basement get free and try to kill betsy and her friends. back on form davidson has written a great story which has the original humour of the first novel, many of the following on novels were less than stellar in my opinion. welcome back!!!!!
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
unworthy compared to the rest of the series, 30 Aug 2008
As already stated by a previous reviewer, this book has large print which means the book is actually quite short. To be honest I think this book was written purely because the author was contracted to write seven books in the series. Otherwise the scant events in this book could have been tacked on the end of the last book. I think that's the whole reason why *Spoiler* the 'undead puppies' suddenly become murderous and three characters are killed off. This makes no sense, in relation to the series, or the latter half of the previous book.
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by MaryJanice Davidson
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