3.5
Be Still My Unbeating Heart
ByPublisher Description
A cozy vampire vacation mystery set in a seaside Italian village, featuring a reformed vampire, his magical talking cat, and a handsome, brooding detective.
Bastian may be a vampire, but he doesn’t bite.
. . . Not anymore, at least.
These days, Bastian just wants to live his best undead life: visit charming Italian villages, maybe dance in the square with a cute boy, all with Whitby, his best friend (and magical talking cat) by his side. What he doesn’t want? To stumble across a dead body on the beach, a girl who appears to have been killed by a vampire.
It wasn’t Bastian. He swears—on his own grave.
But the local police chief doesn’t trust Bastian, or any vampire, for that matter, so he assigns detective Nico De Luca to keep an eye on him until his trial. And while Bastian normally wouldn’t complain about having a gorgeous, mysterious man by his side, he has more important things to worry about, because the police chief has called the Vampire Council, and if the real killer is still at large when they arrive, the whole town could be in danger. As more bodies begin to pile up, Bastian, Whitby, and De Luca must get to the bottom of who in Vernazza is framing vampires, before it’s too late.
Charming, twisty, and laugh-out-loud funny, Be Still My Unbeating Heart by Josh Winning is a delightful romp through a swoon-worthy magical murder mystery.
Bastian may be a vampire, but he doesn’t bite.
. . . Not anymore, at least.
These days, Bastian just wants to live his best undead life: visit charming Italian villages, maybe dance in the square with a cute boy, all with Whitby, his best friend (and magical talking cat) by his side. What he doesn’t want? To stumble across a dead body on the beach, a girl who appears to have been killed by a vampire.
It wasn’t Bastian. He swears—on his own grave.
But the local police chief doesn’t trust Bastian, or any vampire, for that matter, so he assigns detective Nico De Luca to keep an eye on him until his trial. And while Bastian normally wouldn’t complain about having a gorgeous, mysterious man by his side, he has more important things to worry about, because the police chief has called the Vampire Council, and if the real killer is still at large when they arrive, the whole town could be in danger. As more bodies begin to pile up, Bastian, Whitby, and De Luca must get to the bottom of who in Vernazza is framing vampires, before it’s too late.
Charming, twisty, and laugh-out-loud funny, Be Still My Unbeating Heart by Josh Winning is a delightful romp through a swoon-worthy magical murder mystery.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesBe Still My Unbeating Heart Reviews
3.5
“I want to be best friends with Whitby. I know this is not much of a review
I actually quite liked this. It definitely has cozy vibes but some enjoyable suspense and mystery.”
“I was really enjoying this book until about halfway in, and then it had a steep drop off from there.
I enjoyed Bastian and Whitby and their relationship a lot, but De Luca was an odd one out for me. He seemed super underdeveloped for a love interest. Especially when we finally get to the explicit scene and he asks Bastian to call him Nico… and he still continuously gets called De Luca. I lost any sense of the relationship developing and them actually getting close at that time.
The mystery aspect has way too many turns and false starts. It started simply feeling like a way to keep the characters moving throughout the story and town instead of actually developing a good mystery plot.”
About Josh Winning
Josh Winning is the critically acclaimed author of Burn the Negative, which was long-listed for a Bram Stoker Award, Heads Will Roll and The Shadow Glass. He is a senior film writer at Radio Times and has written for Total Film, Gay Times and Den of Geek. Josh lives in Suffolk with his cat Penny and dreams of one day convincing Sigourney Weaver to yell “Goddammit!” at him.
Other books by Josh Winning
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