Dante’s Girl

by Natasha Rhodes

Solaris Books, $7.99; 495 pp.

This book is like a continuous loop of the fourth acts from ‘Terminator’ movies: Loud, loads of action, lots of gore, high body counts and outrageous alien life-forms. And it all takes place in L.A.

For Rhodes, Hollywood is an easy mark. And a useful setting for excess.

Vampires and werewolves are in a vicious, bloody battle to rule the world. The werewolves want immortality and the vampires are not happy about that. The microcosm of the world is the nasty, stylish noir streets of Los Angeles and Hollywood. I don’t recall much daylight in this novel.

The heroine Kayla Steele runs the gamut from clueless to kick-ass babe with high-tech weapons. She’s not too screechy—thank goodness---but she’s a rather two note character. Either bewildered or running on adrenaline. But she’s a babe, make no mistake. Though she is constantly compared to other women in the book and found lacking—she sounds perfectly, well, like a “babe” to me. I mean, she is working a perfume counter somewhere in a West L.A. department store. Do the math.

Caught up in the vampire-werewolf turf war through the untimely death of her boyfriend Karrel Dante, Kayla is plunged willy-nilly into a highly violent world. And everyone in this novel not only has agendas, they switch loyalties as if they were channel surfing. And boy, there are lots of big shiny weapons too, including swords.

And amazingly enough—the city at large is clueless to the existence of vampire and werewolves (as was Kayla), in spite of the constant gory deaths, explosions, weird armored vehicles racing the night streets and big noisy battles between ‘wolves, vamps and armed humans.

There are no quiet moments in this book. There are only hints of sex. And, as I said above, next to no daylight.

This is pretty much written at the same level throughout. Ms. Rhodes’ previous writing credits have been novelizations of films: “Blade: Trinity,” “The Nightmare on Elm Street: Perchance to Dream” as well as three “Final Destination” movies. She learned her lessons well.

But I found the novel, compared to a lot of other vampires-and-werewolves-in- nourish settings to be a bit too derivative.

And too loud. - Sue Martin