Seven Vampires by Lavie Tidhar
My rating: 5/5 cats
A scream pierced the night.
Jonathan kept chewing. He was used to screams in the night.
Judge Dee materialised out of the air and stood beside the fire.
‘Come, Jonathan,’ he said. ‘I fear the worst.’
Jonathan always feared the worst. The worst was inevitably what happened when you were in the company of vampires.
oof, for the first time since 2014, i have fallen off the pony of reading one tor short a week. i didn’t read ANY in february or march, and i haven’t even reviewed two of the ones i read in january. i hate that i fall into a shame-spiral any time i fail to accomplish some stupid self-appointed goal or other, but i do, and now it’s time to pull myself out!
these judge dee stories keep getting better and better, and the bar was already set pretty high with the first one, Judge Dee and the Limits of the Law. this is the fourth (#2 – Judge Dee and the Three Deaths of Count Werdenfels, #3 – Judge Dee and the Poisoner of Montmartre, because i like to make things easy for y’all), and it’s a sort of fang’ed version of And Then There Were None, where a group of vampires (and poor human-companion jonathan) are forced by circumstances to travel together…for safety. however, nothing’s ever really safe when cranky vampires with grudges are gathered up under cover of night, and immortality’s no obstacle to a vampire with a bone to pick. luckily, judge dee is there, along with jonathan—who’s side-eyeing that bone, hoping to gnaw at whatever juicy meat remains—and these vampire-murderrrs will not go unvanquished, and the case is solved in a tidy and unexpected resolution.
another clever and delightful story featuring this oddball pair, reaffirming my desire for MORE OF THEM, putting my wish once more into the universe for a physical collection of these stories to exist, and soon.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2022/02/16/seven-…
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