3.5 Stars

Susan Squires

SACRAMENT

Dorchester

ISBN 0-505-52472-4

2002

This rare example of a vampire Regency romance features all the familiar Regency elements, such as a plucky heroine in trouble, an egoistic rival beauty, an arrogant but magnetic hero, and the select society of London and Bath. SACRAMENT also includes vampirism, archeology, medical experimentation, and Gothic motifs of imprisonment, torture, sinister monks, and ancient secrets. Sarah, alone in the world aside from a would-be fiance for whom she has only lukewarm feelings, faces the risk of losing her family estate to enigmatic aristocrat Julien Davinoff. Her desperate attempt to save her inheritance leads to unexpected revelations about why Davinoff wants her land; an vampire of extraordinary age, he uses the tunnels beneath the ruins on Sarah's estate as a cache for the priceless souvenirs of his very long life. Sarah learns the truth about Davinoff when she becomes entangled in her supposed friend Corina's campaign to win his love. When Corina's seduction fails, she imprisons him in her cellar and forcibly addicts him to laudanum. Sarah rescues him, uses her up-to-date knowledge of medicine (gleaned from her physician suitor) to break the addiction, and learns his secret. Davinoff's yearning to make her his eternal mate by transforming her into a vampire yields to his nobler impulses, and he flees from the temptation. Sarah pursues him into the wilds of Eastern Europe, where she fights for her love in a confrontation with the eldest of all vampires.

SACRAMENT offers an unusual variation on the "vampirism as disease" theory. Squires manages to make the symbiotic blood-borne organism and the ancient monastery of vampire monks in the Carpathians credible. The reader can sympathize with Davinoff's conflict between his love for Sarah and his loyalty to the rigid laws that, he believes, provide the only ethical way of life for his kind. Sarah is a strong heroine who grows in self-knowledge and self-confidence throughout the story, until she attains the capacity to ignore the strictures of her society when they stand in the way of winning love. The plot takes several unexpected turns that lend it freshness in the midst of its more familiar elements. The only weakness, for me, is Davinoff's tendency to fall into the "eternally cursed" mode of the all-too-typical brooding vampires of romance; I always want to shake them and tell them to snap out of it. But Squires does not carry this tendency too far, and her novel should please vampire fans eager for a fresh angle on an established theme.

Reviewed by Margaret L. Carter