If you’re seeing this review and actually like these novels please skip, if you are anyone else, continue as you were. I picked up this book because the cover of the edition I saw has the man standing in front of the plane, wearing aviator glasses with a reflection of the plane wing in them. He’s standing in FRONT of the wing. It’s physically impossible that he could have the reflection at this angle! Surely if the front cover didn’t get reviewed the rest of this novel wouldn’t have gotten reviewed either.
This book is so bad I don’t even know where to start. I don’t even think the author knew what she was writing when producing this. I guess I’ll just start with some quotes to really drive home the bad writing: “[…] she was so slender he has the urge to take her out somewhere and feed her.” (How romantic!! -sarcasm-). Another classic what the F moment comes out at page 30, Jet the pilot is talking about his job, which includes flying vampires around the world and we get to read this gem. “At least with other companies you only had to worry about terrorists blowing you up, or hijackers shooting you.” EXCUSE ME?? This was the sentence that made me check when this book was published. Surely it was 1980? Praying so? Nope. Two thousand and twenty one. 2021!!!! There is no way that should have ever been printed.
I’d like an honourable mention for Quinn’s sister’s name, Petronella, because this stupid name had me laughing when I really wanted to just cry and not finish this book. (But I am a trooper, I had to finish it!) Oh, also Quinn thinks Jet is a stupid name but her sister is literally gas-nella. Make it make sense folks!
By page 50, the airplane has been destroyed, something about bombs in the engines…I forgot to mention Quinn and the rest of the passengers are vampires. Jet and the other (now dead) pilot are mortals. Jet keeps saying things like “the she-pires” instead of just the passengers. He’s not a good professional. Essentially the rest of the book is spent on the ground, meaning the title “mile high with a vampire” is hugely misleading. Quinn’s job is a heart surgeon, she is an actual doctor. This is important for later.
Jet has enough mind changing on if vampires are good or bad, you can get whiplash just trying to understand why he flip flops so hard. Another lovely quote: “Being a life mate meant turning like (bbf Abigail) had done, and that meant becoming a blood drinker, which just sounded disgusting to him.” Suppose I should explain life mates, since the book really drills in this wording; they’re (Quinn and Jet) destined to be together. They technically met 4 years before this book since he flew her somewhere, and has had a raging hard on for her ever since but again she is a she-pire. So he can only dream of sleeping with her, not actually doing it. Meanwhile she has no recollection of him whatsoever, it’s humorous that way.
Anyways, back to the “plot”. They spend some chapters in the forest/jungle where the plane crashed trying to find help and stay far enough away from the other vampires that they won’t drain Jet dry once they wake up and see they’re in bad shape from the crash. They do finally find help by a rich cabin in the woods type spa thing, and the workers are described as, “Either the lodge catered to rich old perverts who liked having large breasted women around, or the guy in charge of hiring did, Jet thought. He’d always preferred smaller, well shaped ones himself. Like Quinn’s”, which really gets the point across that Jet thinks everyone else is the pervert, not him. That’s a totally normal sentence to think right? And just in case the reader forgot all these women have huge boobs we get this sentence on the next page, “the red headed Brittany destined for back issues”. It’s so stupid again you have to choose between laughing and crying.
All the humans get shuffled into the basement/booze box/storage area in a cage, just to give Quinn a chance to kill the rest of the vampires before the humans are used as food. She gets a massive gun, and then closes her eyes to shoot the intruder. Turns out it’s the head of security(?) some VIP vampire dude who I think also is Jet’s boss? It was very unclear. Might just be the manager of vampires?
Q&J get taken to civilization. The rest of the vampires are labeled dead, and the employees of the lodge just stay in the middle of nowhere opening the lodge for the season. After they were in huge amounts of danger. Seems plausible.
Quinn is having a conversation with the motherly vampire, who we find out is a therapist named Mary. Quinn is talking about the mangled body leftovers she saw of the vampires from the plane crash. The quote is: Mary:”Funny because the image that flashed through your mind when you thought of her looked more like a picture I once saw of those poor victims of concentration camps like Auschwitz.” THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. This is when I learned this novel is actually 33 in a line up of 34! How did we get so many books and this is written like trash still? Did the author have zero growth? Is book 1 actually good because she needed it to be published? The next page brings us to a way lighter topic, the fact that Quinn hasn’t shaved her legs in 4 years and it’s apparently the end of the world to Mary. She points out “I originally thought perhaps it was depression”, to which Quinn brilliantly thinks “Had (I) been depressed?” A DOCTOR didn’t know she was depressed??
The girls then go shopping for clothing and cue a very trivial underwear shopping scene where Mary is trying to get Quinn to buy thongs for Jet, and Quinn utters “maybe but wearing thongs for any length of time can irritate your vajayjay”. The doctor. The heart surgeon cannot say vagina. Tell me why?? In this store, she sees a man at the store front which causes her to faint/bash her head in on the floor. They all rush home to heal her. The entire group stays around her bed talking about her significant trauma while she “sleeps”. Clearly she wakes up and just pretends to sleep, thus leading to a massive breakdown for her.
We get some more back story about the plane crash, basically the Chinese vampire mafia have targeted the plane but nobody knows why. They suspect it’s due to Quinn’s parents dying by the mafia’s hands, and that Quinn just changed her name to have her mother’s name included in her own. Since you know, vampires need to take new identities every few years instead of every 20 or so, or was highly important she do this NOW. And the real important fact is that she and Gasnella were shoved into a closet to survive the mafia, but one of the mafia’s guys turned out to be a life mate to Quinn and that’s why he let the girls live. We were told earlier that vampires only have 1 life mate that’s why Jet is so important but actually they can have many. You just gotta collect them all.
We get some more mentions about how Quinn has a son who is also a vampire because her ex husband got turned and then turned her/the son. The son has been leaving with Gasnella in Italy, learning how to be a real vampire which includes being able to read people’s minds. You’d think that we would have gotten more hints about that key character choice but nope.
So anyways while Quinn is recovering from breaking her head in the store, Jet has come around real good to being her bodyguard or boyfriend, trusted advisor, whatever. She starts 3 hour therapy sessions with Mary and then re-tells Jet everything we just learned in the session. The writing is bad ok. It really follows the “say what you’re going to say, say the things, and finish by saying what you just said” method of public speaking in written form.
Jet decides he wants to stay by Quinn’s side forever. Quinn thinks “ok sure.” [SELF HARM TRIGGER TAG, skip to next paragraph!] So they decide to turn him into a vampire. It is the worst transformation scene I have ever seen in my lifetime. They chain him to a bed, then they remove him from the bed just to take off the sheets since there’s no reason to ruin the sheets when the mattress has some sort of blood protection on it, so it won’t get stained when they do this. (So weird!) Chain him back up, and then Quinn has to slit her wrist and feed him the blood from her wrist. She does so but not quickly enough, her wrist begins to heal. She must do it a SECOND time! And she gets harassed by Mary for not going fast enough which was funny as this is not a high stakes moment at all. Jet then thrashes around on the bed in so much agony that the chapter ends and we come back after like a day? Apparently Jet’s pain is not important.
Q&J go back to the mall now that he���s a vampire, to get the clothes they couldn’t finish getting last trip. He has to wear contacts because vampire eyes are silver and they’ll scare the humans. They go to the washrooms, and when he comes out he gets poison darted by the mafia. The mafia kidnaps the two of them. In the car, the one mafia guy explains that his dad was the life mate who found Quinn when she was little, and that because he spared her life the mafia was super pissed at him and tortured him until he died. Jet wakes up on the floor in the car, and then because the mafia thought he was human (yay contacts to save the day!) he’s able to deck the mafia and they are done being kidnapped. They get into another car and start driving back to the safe house. On the way there, they get frisky in the car and pass out on top of each other. When they wake up, they realize their car was towed back to the safe house. One of the body guards says something like, yeah we saw you on the GPS and went and towed the car. It was weird trying to reach the gas pedals with you in the driver seat and Quinn passed out on top of you, it took me a hour to get you back here. I had to crouch on the centre console to make it happen.
WHAT THE EVER LOVING F IS THAT?? So creepy!
The story ends with Q&J admitting they love each other. When can I get the lastest hours of my life back?
The author picture on the back is so blurry I think she went into witness protection after publishing this book.