Review

For fans of:  Deborah Donnelly and Jerrilyn Farmer

When party-planner Presley Parker is hired by movie producer Lucas Cruz to throw an extravagant wrap party in a local cemetery, she’s hoping the media coverage of the event will help propel her company, Killer Parties, into the spotlight.  Unfortunately for Presley, however, the thing that gets her name on the news isn’t her success as a host – it’s the dead paparazzo she finds in an open grave after the guests have gone home.  Determined to save her professional reputation, Presley starts doing some investigating.  Who wanted the photographer dead, and why?  And is there any chance his murder is somehow connected to a fatal accident that took place in the graveyard the night before the party?  Can Presley dig up enough dirt to catch the killer without digging her own grave?

How to Party with a Killer Vampire is the fourth of Penny Warner’s Party-Planning Mysteries.   Full of gossip, lies, celebrities, and dead bodies, the atmosphere is strong, the story is fun, and the mystery will keep you guessing until the very end.  The pace does lag a bit in the middle, and the party planning tips that appear at the start of each chapter compound this problem by disrupting the flow of the story, but the book starts strong and climaxes with a bang big enough to compensate for its duller moments.

Presley makes for a winsome heroine, and I actually discovered I liked her more here than I did in previous books.  Where before her snark and sarcasm seemed forced and over-the-top, How to Party with a Killer Vampire finds Presley a more natural, well-balanced character.  Her narration is smart and funny and gives the reader a good sense of who she is as a person, and her relationship with her mother, a retired party-planner who’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, is sweet and realistic and helps give Presley depth.  I still think Warner relies a bit too heavily on Presley’s background in abnormal psychology to forward her plot (that detail just doesn’t ring true to me, for some reason), but that’s a minor complaint, and overall, I’d say Presley’s developing into a protagonist more than capable of carrying the series for many books to come.

As for the rest of her cast, crime-scene cleaner and love interest Brad is a great sidekick for Presley and an interesting character in his own right, and Detective Luke Melvin is the perfect thorn in Presley’s side.  I confess I wasn’t wild about some of the book’s more minor players (the Parkour traceurs, in particular, were a bit cartoonish for my taste), but generally speaking, Warner’s writing is populated with more hits than misses, and I always look forward to seeing what kind of eccentric guests will attend Presley’s next to-do.

Looking for a lighthearted whodunit to help get you in the mood for that upcoming Halloween bash?  Look no further than Penny Warner’s How to Party with a Killer Vampire.

Reviewed by Kat