Thank you, Netgalley for the ARC of Sorcery of the Blood in exchange for an honest review

Sorcery of the Blood was a fun and intense read. It's essentially about Vampire Hunters Kingston and Martin who are trying to make Phoenix a safer place for humans once again. But then, Kingston gets bitten by an old vampire and turns. With the help of Martin and some vampires who rely on donor blood instead of killing humans willy-nilly, he is brought to a safe-place to come to terms with his new undead-ness. In the meantime, the vampire who turned Kingston takes over the city dictator-style and Martin discovers something about himself: he has magic.

Together, they try to undo the evil vampire regime by joining forces, learning and teaching how to fight and, Kingston and Martin try to navigate the romantic feelings they have for each other which seem to become stronger than ever.

I liked the dynamics between the characters and I really loved the diversity. While there are not only characters of every ethnicity and sexual orientation, there are lovely human/vampire relationships that explore the issues that arise when one partner is immortal and one isn't. The pining between Martin and Kingston was absolutely lovely and I was rooting for them from the first second on.

The villain was of a very good-old-fashioned kind of villain sort: hella racist, hella homophobic, and unapologetically evil. You are immediately hell set against him because he does not have a single shred of decency.

So, the villain is a white cishet male who is fighting queer vampires of all genders and sexualities (except straight) and there are some nods to Nazi Germany and I thought that I would've loved to see a little more variety. I would have loved to see some white cishet human/vampire allys on the good side and maybe some influences from some other terrible dictorial regimes in there. The latter would have appealed to the history nerd in me, and since the villain is a couple of hundred years old, I would've loved a backstory of how he became evil and how he travelled the world to be part of all the regimes. Just to hate him a little bit more (even though he is already up there with Umbridge from Harry Potter tbh.) But these are very minor complaints because as I said, I enjoyed the characters a LOT, they were quite lovely and fleshed out :)

The pacing was great, up until the 'big fight' between good and evil. I thought that the fight, as well as the aftermath was pretty quickly resolved - too quickly almost for the foreboding and panic and anxiety that was around the whole time. I felt as if I was waiting for the Supermario Superboss to show up and the ending was a little more fireball spewing plant.

All in all, I did enjoy this though and I can't wait to see what Alice G. Holmes does next! Their writing was lovely all throughout and the world building was also fantastic. I'd recommend this to everyone who is into vampire novels first of all and pining second of all because... the amount of love and pining in this book is just great!