First Fruits

Title: First Fruits
Author:  Amanda Carney
Publication date: 12/13/2015
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Kindle Unlimited: No
Cliffhanger: Yes
Rating: 4 out of 5

Blurb (from Amazon.com):

Reading minds can be dangerous.

Parsley Walker can hear people’s thoughts and it’s made her a target. As a natural born telepath who’s also telekinetic—two things that can be disturbingly lucrative in the wrong person’s hands—she’s learned to hide who she is. To be always moving and never at ease. To run from that inevitable moment of discovery. She’s a nomad in a waitress’s uniform. This is how she survives.

Until him. ​​

Jesse Linwood is a vampire with a problem. An automaton with sharp teeth, he was sent to evaluate and ultimately abduct her. What he doesn’t expect is the way her blue eyes turn him inside out. Stalking her wasn’t supposed to make him feel anything. She was supposed be like all the others. He begins to unravel and, in the end, makes the choice to pick a fight he knows he cannot win in order to save her life.

My review
I have to admit, I almost didn’t read this story. I was instantly snobbish because of the heroine’s name. (I mean, really, Parsley?) But thankfully, the blurb was well written because if it hadn’t been, I would’ve missed out on a really interesting book.

The author has created a really cool world here, one where vampires aren’t at all stereotypical. (They can even go out in the sunlight and eat real food) The hero, Jesse, was strong and brooding and protective without being an alpha-hole (that’s an alpha male asshole, for those of you who aren’t terribly familiar with the PNR genre, which is damn-near overrun with alpha-holes). The villains were creepy as hell without being cartoonish. And even though I cringed every time I read her name, Parsley was a decent heroine.

I also have to give a shout out to the book’s editors. First Fruits was free of typos, grammar and punctuation errors, and continuity problems. The author obviously did her homework and chose a good editing team. Kudos.

Finally, I really like the cover as well. It does a great job of conveying the book's mood/feeling without straining too hard to provide a visual synopsis of the entire novel. Can't stand it when book covers are cluttered up and overly busy.

So why a 4 and not a 5-star rating? Two reasons: the heroine’s name (sorry, I just can’t let it go entirely) and the cliffhanger. I LOATHE cliffhangers. (Although, in all fairness, the author does warn readers about it in her blurb on Amazon).

Long-story-short: First Fruits is definitely worth a read. And despite the cliffhanger, I’ll most likely read Book 2, Second Coming, which is also available on Amazon. I can only hope there’s a good explanation for the heroine’s name in Book 2...

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