The Eye of Heaven

by JoAnne Soper-Cook

When Dante di Salvatore, former prostitute and adopted son of one of Florence’s reigning nobles, is bitten by the ancient vampire goddess Lillith, his mortal life is over. Once enslaved by the vampire queen’s malign influence, Dante allies himself with Rouen, a young man of dazzling beauty and great influence who is enamored with Dante. But they cannot truly be together unless Dante changes Rouen into a vampire, and for Rouen, accepting the dark gift may ultimately cost him his immortal soul. Soon the great city of Florence will be taken to account for her sins as the streets are scourged of everything the fanatical preacher Serenola deems unnatural.

But many silent, mostly unseen creatures of the night are coming together from the disparate corners of the earth to do battle one last time against Serenola, evil disguised as good. What Dante does not realize is that he, above all others, holds the key to not only his own salvation, but the preservation of all of vampire kind—and perhaps even the human race.

Genres: M M Romance, Vampires, Historical, Paranormal, Fantasy, Paranormal Romance, Romance

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 17, 2011

About the author

Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweepers
Come to dust.

Reviews

[Misty · Rating 4 out of 5]

** 3.75 Stars **


It's been one hell of a ride, brutal, intense and crazy! These were precarious and frightening times, between the plague that brought total chaos and religious fanaticism that brought mass hysteria. The first person narrative was all right however the multiple POVs was annoying. It was definitely an intriguing read!

[SheReadsALot]

Currently Free on Dreamspinners today for one hour only (ends 5:30pm EST)

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[Doreen Nugent · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dreadful, ridiculous, horrible, poorly-executed, and just a sad, sad excuse for a historical novel. Possibly the worst author ever, in the history of the world, and that's saying something.

[Laylah Hunter]

Melodramatic vampires and their grand passion in the time of Plague! A good fit for anyone who likes their bloodsuckers in a Louis/Lestat mode, I think, with intense sensuality and overwrought emotions and baroque prose as they tell their stories. Which is not a criticism -- it takes skill to do that kind of florid, heavy-laden voice and not get lost in it, and it works here. And while the author takes some historical liberties, they're deliberate ones explained in a note at the beginning, which I find a lot more readable than the kind where somebody just didn't do enough research. (I will grant, though, that vampire stories in general are not the best place to demand letter-perfect historical accuracy.)

I felt like I lost the emotional hook at some point in reading it; pretty immortal monsters and their drama don't speak to me the way they used to. And I continue to have really mixed feelings about Lilith, being the only major female presence in the text and quite literally a force of sexual predation and mass destruction. Which is, of course, true to Her mythos, but it's still an awkward thing to encounter in a genre that too often treats female characters in general as evil threats to m/m happy endings. The context of the rest of the stories surrounding this one inflect it with unfortunate resonance.

Also a note on trans issues -- near the end of the story we meet a character by the name of Melina, who appears to identify male and repeatedly says as much to Rouen ("I am a gentleman"), and none of the other characters respect that, consistently using she/her pronouns and insisting that Melina's "true gender" is female. Which I could have brushed off as unfortunate but a historical likelihood, were it not for the fact that the narrating vampires are framed as writing down their story in modern times, and someone goes to the trouble of correcting an assumption about evil witches by pointing out that "the Wiccans" actually "worship the Goddess, and do no harm." If you can be anachronistic to avoid harm to Pagans, you can also be anachronistic to avoid harm to trans folks, and I wish this story had.

An engaging read, though, and the author is clearly skilled.

[Nightcolors]

Read for the Q4 quarterly gang bang challenge.

I had a hard time with this book. Not the book's fault at all. It just really pushed at my personal comfort level. I won't rate this because I didn't completely finish reading it. I got to the end of chapter 14, then was unable to read on, but was still curious about what'll happen to Dante, Rouen, Valentin and others, so I read backwards: I read chapter 25, then chapter 24, so on until chapter 20. I might read chapters 15 - 19 someday, but not right now.

This was a hard book for me because of the way the characters suffered... but they were also cruel to others, so I started to distance myself from them to care less about them. Even so, I kinda liked the way vampires were portrayed in this novel; it felt more... realistic? (if I can use that word to describe mythical beings) that they didn't always care about human lives now that they weren't human.

[Lillian Francis]

Officially abandoning this book at 26%.
I'm struggling to stay engaged in the story with all the multiple POVs and the dark nature of both the story and the characters and their relationships.
I'm not deleting the book from my Kindle as I may come back to it at some point in the future, it's issues aren't with the quality of the writing, but for now this book is not for me.