The Turning by Jennifer Armintrout

Ugh. This book is terrible. The author never met a stereotype she didn't like (not just for vampires), and it is just full of sloppy prose like soft carpets that cut the heroine's skin like razors. Rug burn, I might believe. Razors? No.

The main character is a driven doctor, her boss is a hard-assed emergency doc, she walks among the quintessential hipsters and goths, her mother was a "career feminist," whatever that means, her father was a Freudian psychologist (or was it Jung? I don't really care enough to go back and check.)

And then the vampires. There's the evil-overlord-barely-human vampire (hey, the Master from Buffy!), his evil vampire son (nowhere near as interesting as Spike) and the tormented good-guy vampire (and look, it's Angel!) Oh, but he's Scottish, so throw some Highlander in the there. Much of this book reads like the author loved Buffy, but never got what made it great.

So yes, new resident Carrie Ames is attacked by a vampire in the morgue one night, after being told by her hard-assed attending that maybe she's not cut out to be a doctor (not even just "not cut out to be an emergency room doc" - you can switch residency programs, you know.) Then she becomes a vampire. Then she is not killed by sexy good vampire Nathan, who works for the extermination of all vampires. But Carrie's not going to be controlled, so she goes to find her sexy evil vampire sire. (Wait, that's the only other option you can think of? Really?) There, he abuses her sexily and she hates him and loves him and hates him and loves him and fights against THE HUNGER. And then hates him, and helps plot his downfall, and sides with the good vampires, sort of. Sort of! See, it's complex! Wait, no, it's not.

Look. It's vampire romance, published by a Harlequin subsidiary. I knew this going in. But I at least wanted competent vampire romance published by a Harlequin subsidiary. Heck, Mercedes Lackey has published fantasy romance under this particular imprint, and those books are great!

This is how bad this book is. You know that hackneyed romantic comedy convention where everything, literally everything could be cleared up by one sentence? This book has a moment where the heroine thinks "I could clear up everything with one sentence, but I'm not going to." Aaah! Because false drama is so much more interesting than real drama.

So yeah. If you're looking for vampire romance, stick with Charlaine Harris. They're not great books, but at least they're readable.