I have been wanting to read Hunger Pangs for quite some time. When The Flirting With Fangs Edition finally turned up at my library, I just had to check it out. The setting is non-Earth, and post-apocalyptic, in a world with magic, were-creatures, and various undead creatures, including vampires. (Note: Flirting with Fangs is the spicier version. There is also a Fluff and Fangs edition that has more fluff and less spice.)
Protagonist A is a werewolf veteran named Nathan J. Northland, returning home from the wars his vaguely British flavored empire is engaged in. His homecoming is a mixed bag of happiness and tragedy: Our Boy is walking wounded after having been nearly killed by a silver-tipped bullet. Worse still, he is no longer able to change his shape, and is in general extremely disabled. Not really able to handle the pity of his family, he accepts a job offer as a guard captain of Eyrie, a County run by a family of vampires. (Something pretty much unheard of because weres and vamps do not get along.)
Protagonist B is a vampire named Vlad Blutstein. He is a dandy who plays at being a genius, or a genius playing at being a dandy. He’s a vamp with a thousand ideas for improving the lives of his people and a deep resentment at having to deal with having to act as a proxy for the Count of Eyrie. (The members of Parliament are for the most part extremely awful as one may expect of nobles more interested in suppressing riots than addressing what caused them in the first place.)
Protagonist C is Lady Ursula, a mysterious figure who is on an extremely desperate quest to save the sacred Ancestral Trees from a demonic blight. She gets the shortest character description because most of the story is actually about the growing relationship between Nathan and Vlad. (Also, it would be spoiling the action part of the plot.)
Most of the action in this book is between Nathan and Vlad, who of end up inside each other’s orbit. They seemingly couldn’t be more different, and yet there is a whole lot of attraction between them. (They do have one thing in common: their parents have expectations that neither one of them really wants to fulfill.) This is a charming romance that happily ignores the usual were-creature and vampire tropes of instinctive aggression and need for dominance. (The biggest difference: werewolves are depicted as family types. Vampires are usually solitary by preference; any time you have a group of vampires its because there’s a strict hierarchy being maintained. This is mostly evidenced by Vlad never calling the Count anything but the Count. A thing which is utterly alien to his werewolf boyfriend.)
Protagonist C is not quite showing up with the Call to Adventure. Instead, she ends up getting Nathan to take her to the family’s Ancestral Tree, and then gets advice from Vlad concerning a demonic blight affecting the Ancestral Trees. (There is also some minor Huge Library Burglary.) Then she goes off to presumably fix the problem. There is also a great deal of flirting between all three of them, and everyone seems to be chill with that, which is not often the case when there are two male protagonists and one female protagonist.
I am really looking forward to reading the sequels to this. (There are some side stories, but I don’t think the direct sequel to this book is out yet. I am looking, but not finding anything.)
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