Red Dawn by J.J. Bonds

Title: Red Dawn
Series: Crossroads Academy
Author: J.J. Bonds
Previous Books in Series: Crossroads
Rating: 4 stars
Length: 2499 Kindle units

Refresher: Hostile teen vampire Katia goes to elite boarding school, where she is constantly afraid her secrets will be discovered.

At the end of Crossroads, we finally learn all of Katia’s secrets, so it’s possible that she’s going to be polite and amicable in book 2. But, alas, she is as snarky and defensive as ever, at least to the people she dislikes. Which is good, because it makes her an interesting heroine. She is also fiercely loyal to her friends, and she’s broadening that sphere to include at least a few more people.

It is her friendship with Shaye that causes the conflict in the book. Shaye suffers from the rare vampire blood disease, and just as a scientist discovers the cure, he steals it and vanishes. Katia is not content to sit by and let her friend die, so she learns everything she can about the theft and decides to investigate it herself.

I confess I was a little bit incredulous that this entire mission was undertaken by teenagers. I believed that Katia would go to these kind of extremes, but I found it odd no one else in the vampire world was able to pick up on the same clues as she did. All in all I feel like things came a bit too easily for Katia. The book was quite short. I would have liked to see a few more twists and turns that would have lengthened it and maybe made the whole thing a bit more believable. But, then, if I really wanted believability in my novels, I wouldn’t be reading about wealthy teen vampires.

I think that in some ways, Red Dawn was a set up for the third and future books in the series, because we uncover a new and dangerous enemy who looks able to plague the vampire world for many books to come. I am looking forward to seeing where that goes, especially since I think this enemy is going to have a sympathetic side.

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