NovelCritic

When T.M. Moore approached me about reading and reviewing Destiny’s Forge, I have to say that I was pretty excited. I’m a sucker for a good vampire book and having a vampire book in the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre — well, let’s just say that I couldn’t wait to get started.

With so many high hopes for a science fiction vampire novel, I was pretty much setting myself up for a fall. I was hoping for too much from a self-published novel. Right?

To set the scene, Antonia, the heroine of the story, is marooned on a planet where she happens to help the right stranger and in short order, finds herself with an officer’s commission in Star Command. While in Star Command she finds that things aboard her ship and throughout Star Command are not as they should be. There are various plots afoot, and she finds herself in the unique position of being able to fix these problems and thwart these plots. She is in this position because, one, she is a a Star Command officer, and because, two, she is a vampire.

The beginning of the story had me a little bit confused. That isn’t to say that the beginning was boring in any way, but there were a couple of times when I wondered if I had picked the book back up at the right page because what I was currently reading bore very little similarity to what I had previously been reading. Apparently T.M. Moore decided that only certain parts of her pre-Star Command history were important because there were some pretty sizable gaps in Antonia’s story in the first hundred pages. In retrospect, the beginning made perfect sense, and her choices on what to tell and what not to tell were probably good ones. They just confused me at the time. As the story unfolds, the beginning becomes perfectly clear.

Well, maybe not perfectly clear, but I hear that the second book clears up a few of the questions that I am still pondering.

This story as a whole was riveting, and I have to admit that most of the twists in the story completely blind-sided me. I thought that I was reading a simple Sci-Fi vampire book with Antonia out to right a few little wrongs in space. Little did I know that T.M. Moore was a little bit more ambitious that I had first thought. She suckered me into it. I honestly didn’t see it coming. I wish I could tell you more, but I refuse to ruin it for you. Suffice it to say, that you will not be disappointed.

I’ve read some pretty good vampire novels from Anne Rice and Barbara Hambly, among others, but this innovative retelling of the popular (and often stale) vampire genre blew me away. It was better than any of those. It was better than I hoped it could be. I can’t wait to get my hands on the second book. Get a copy of Destiny’s Forge for yourself today.

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