Liked it!

Well it is definitely a strange new world, with blood shortages and rivalries, all that matters is to keep his girl safe.

(This review is for No Dominion, Half the Blood of Brooklyn and Every Last Drop.)

I didn't love Joe Pitt in Already Dead.

And I don't love him in any of the next three, exactly. But I do love Charlie Huston and the world he's created.

And as much as I do love Anita Blake and Buffy Summers, Huston's world is scary as hell. And about as much fun.

It feels more like the Mafia or gang wars than the supernatural dreck that's out there these days. It's all about turf and clans and betrayal.

And it's good, good shit.

And the ride continues

Charlie Huston has another series of books (a trilogy) which consists of Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, and A Dangerous Man. Go read those; they're pretty terrific. This is the second in his series about a loner noirish vampire sort-of P.I. who navigates amongst various clan factions of vampires who have territories in Manhattan, and it's got a Lower East Side attitude in spades, and not much else. There was an initial build-out of a mythos in the first book, but now in the second book, he has to spend half his time recapping the mythos for those who came in late or can't be bothered to have retained the details of all of his warring factions from a book published several years ago. Then we have a decent chunk of space devote to dribbling out a little more detail on these clans and their relationships to one another, plus some foreshadowing of things yet unrevealed, because, God help me, this is going to be a saga now, and we can't be shooting all of our expository wad at once. Daddy's got mortgage payments to make, so we'll be stretching this out over many books to come. That doesn't leave a lot of space for a compelling story, especially since you have to sift it all through a Nick Tosches attitude. So I'll be holding back my contribution to the mortgage in the future, thanks.

And while I'm ranting, when the fuck did every story about vampires turn into a complicated saga about warring factions within a vampire society, all with a complicated backstory of slights and treacheries committed over the centuries that I'm supposed to retain to make sense of the plot? Here's a hint to all the creators who have one of these in mind: I watched the Blade movies because I find Wesley Snipes and Kris Kristofferson masters of camp. I watched the first two Underworld movies because Kate Beckinsale's ass in latex....sorry, I lost my train of thought there. I have no interest in the Twilight series because I am not scared of penises and fluids, so I exist outside of the target demographic of Mormon housewives, teenage girls, and women who dress up their cats for whom those books appeal. I don't read Laurell K. Hamilton because I don't need the fig leaf of a vampire to hide my desire for porn. But let's detect the theme....NONE OF THESE CHOICES ARE PREDICATED ON THE MERITS OF YOUR COMPLICATED POLITICAL SYSTEMS. I'm not interested in your Beirut-like construction of warring factions. It's just the blah blah blah in between the biting, or the Kate Beckinsale picking something up off the floor, or the not-fucking, or the fucking. Just stop, please. Vampire story: one vampire, he/she bites people, it's a metaphor for sex, good people kill the vampire at the end so we can valorize repression. It's not fucking rocket science, people.

This book is the 2nd in the series. Originally I picked up the 1st book because it looked like most of my current junk reading (vampires, etc).

This is not junk reading.

The series is very dark - it would be accurate to describe it as noir. And, its very well written. Think Dashiell Hammett mixed with a little bit of sad love. The protagonist's love life really sums it up. His girlfriend isn't big into touching him at all, because she is HIV+. He doesn't want to touch his girlfriend too much because he doesn't know how his virus (vampirism) is transmitted, and doesn't want to risk it. And so...they cling to one another.

Just a strong image left over in my mind after reading it.

No Dominion is an OK book. Both the world and how Charlie Huston breaks down the Vampyre clans are entertaining (despite it being SUPER cringe to read a white man use so many racial stereotypes in his writing), but all in all, this book lacks depth and character.

I will give his other books a chance, but this is the kind of book I will only vaguely remember a year from now.

I’d like to start this review with an exhortation to the horror-tinged-detective-novel-written-in-the-first-person-buying public: Drop that crappy Laurell K. Hamilton book and get on the Charlie Huston train!

With ALREADY DEAD, Huston took his already keen noir skills into the supernatural realm, populating Manhattan with a patchwork of rival “vampyre” clans and doing away with quotation marks altogether. His protagonist – undead sad-sack private eye Joe Pitt – was introduced with macabre magnificence, and bloody gobbets of praise rained down from every critical balcony.

ALREADY DEAD’s sequel, NO DOMINION, proves that Charlie Huston has got a lot of gas left in his chainsaw, and his work is far from done.

The thing about well-done noir is that the hero really has to get beat to shit before he’s allowed to accomplish anything, and this is true to a brutal degree in NO DOMINION.

http://www.bookgasm.com/reviews/horro...

The first one didn't quite do it for me. I thought it was a good story, good ideas, good characters, but I didn't connect to the series in the way I like to, and so I had this book sitting in my room for weeks. Finally, nothing else to read, sit down with this and am down for the count. This book right here is where Huston really introduces us to Pitt and the world he lives in, and this is where I fell in love with it. The story-line is compelling, the action was gritty and drawing and the characters were absolutely spot-on. He doesn't lose that hard-boiled edge, but Huston manages to make me care about the characters in a way I really didn't first time through Already Dead. An amazing addition to the urban fantasy genre without the whiny, guilt-ridden protagonist. Pitt is bad-ass, no apologies. Gotta love it.

love love love this book series.

No Dominion is the second book in Joe Pitt series written by Charlie Huston. It centers on Joe Pitt, a private investigator and vampire who solves cases in a supernatural Manhattan.

When a fellow bloodsucker who seems revved up on drugs picks a bar fight with Joe Pitt, the detective discovers that a new drug has hit the street, one strong enough to cut through the vampire virus and make its users do unpredictable things, things that could bring unwelcome exposure to New York's vampire community.

Word has it that the drug, "anathema," comes from suppliers in Harlem. The leader of the Society Clan of vampires hires Pitt to investigate uptown, but the all-black vampire clan called the Hood, run by one DJ Grave Digga, has other plans in mind for the rogue detective.

Meanwhile, Pitt's HIV-positive girlfriend Evie, who's struggling with a new round of medication, is beginning to lose patience with Pitt's secrecy and disappearances.

No Dominion is written rather well. The narrative of the doomed love story at the heart of Huston's action-filled epic is what truly makes this a noir novel, and the undead microcosm of society he creates is both surprisingly relevant and entertaining. The underbelly of Manhattan is painted in broad, vibrant strokes and seemingly comes alive with stark description and hard action. Huston write crime noir story exceeding well filled with grimy streets and dives and working stiffs who can't catch a break.

All in all, No Dominion is written rather well and is a good continuation to what would hopefully be a wonderful series, which I plan to continue in the very near future.

I really like this book, I really suspense book and how other characters are dealing with problems and show h0w they overcome them. Joe the main character was abused a lot and had a lot in his mind but always had something nice to say about people and never really liked arguing or fighting. The only thing I disliked about this book was that it was a really slow book, it took a while to lead to the conflict of the story and would've like to seen the problem in the beginning of the story