Amazon Review

The Winter Man by Denise Vitola.

Urban Fantasy genre, vampire detective division.

Nickie Chim is a "hemotoman" - her very own coinage for "vampire." She's been a vampire for around 90 years and during that time decided to parley her interest in blood - and forensic lab equivalent ability to taste the chemicals in blood - into a business as a consulting forensic examiner. She is also the head of her "clan" - the family like unit that hemotomans form under an "alpha male/female" leader - she has a gambling problem and her longest vampire friend and lover is going through a "mid-life crisis."


She also has to crack a serial killer mystery before he strikes again and excises the pituitary gland from the brain of his next victim during the next snow fall, so the clock is ticking and her personal issues aren't helping her get any closer to cracking the mystery.

I gave this book four stars, but I would actually rate it somewhere between "it's ok" and "I like it." The mystery isn't much of one since we are given two suspects with the same last name at an early point in the book, and we are able to rule out one of them not too long after. The real mystery seems to be (a) what is the killer's motivation and (b) how can they find him before the next snow fall. This last task seems frustratingly simple since he keeps getting reported as being seen at various locations that Nickie visits.

Denise Vitola is an excellent writer. I have read two of her "Moon" stories and her writing flows quite nicely. She also has a talent for "location." I am captivated by the "Humanitarian" dystopia she describes in her "Moon" stories, which for me seems to be as interesting a feature as her characters.

In "Winter Man," Vitola's apparent knowledge of Washington, D.C. is used to good effect. I had the feeling that I could have followed Chim's movements through the city.

The Hemotoman culture suggested a depth beyond that which we were told about in the book. We learned very little about how Nickie or her clan members became vampires or how these vampires seem to be integrated into a human culture without much notice. Vitola worked in a nice conceit about a "vampire mid-life crisis" that comes on sometime into a vampire's fourth century upon the realization that eternity is a long time.

My biggest problem with the book was my confict between rooting for Nickie as a pursuer of the evil Winter Man and feeling repulsed by her casual attitude toward killing humans. I noticed that in the book, the Winter Man racked up a body count of four or five victims; Nickie racked up a similar body count of unnamed, trivial humans who she killed when she was high on epinephrine or tense or just hungry. Likwise, one of Nickie's clan members kills a young woman in her house, and the big issue this generates is, what should be done with the body? Unlike the Winter Man's victims, who had names and histories, Nickie mentions off-hand how she took down two victims in Georgetown and one on the way home from some part of her case. The victims are unnamed and, apparently, caught her attention at the wrong time for them. Were they drug-pushers, doctors, mothers, grad students? Who knows? It's not important to Nickie, or Vitola, it seems.

And, so I wonder if Vitola's point was to not have the monster that Nickie is get in the way of our rooting for her? Or what seems more likely, was Vitola's point to tell us that Nickie is a monster - and her callous indifference to those whom she kills is how Nickie sees the world. Nickie helps the police catch killers as part of her protective coloration, not because she feels any condemnation of those killers or empathy for the victims. That latter interpretation is hinted at the end of the story when Nickie confronts the Winter Man.

Also, and although it is not central to the mystery of the book, the last paragraph of the story was the most startling, and jerked my estimation of the book up by a few notches.

So, my rating is around 3.5 stars because I'm conflicted about whether I like Nickie Chim. I don't think I do, but I would read another Nickie Chim book because this one gave me entertainment value for my money.