At Grave's End by Jeaniene Frost

 

SOME THINGS WON’T STAY BURIED…

AT GRAVE’S END

It should be the best time of half-vampire Cat Crawfield’s life. With her undead lover Bones at her side, she’s successfully protected mortals from the rogue undead. But though Cat’s worn disguise after disguise to keep her true identity a secret from the brazen bloodsuckers, her cover’s finally been blown, placing her in terrible danger.

As if that wasn’t enough, a woman from Bones’s past is determined to bury him once and for all. Caught in the crosshairs of a vengeful vamp, yet determined to help Bones stop a lethal magic from being unleashed, Cat’s about to learn the true meaning of bad blood. And the tricks she’s learned as a special agent won’t help her. She will need to fully embrace her vampire instincts in order to save herself—and Bones—from a fate worse than the grave.

At Grave’s End (Night Huntress, book three) by Jeaniene Frost

Start date: July 25, 2021

End date: July 27, 2021

Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 stars

Trigger warning: sexual harassment, torture, sexual assault, offensive language

I’ve been reading this series purely out of spite. It started off with me despising Cat and chuckling at how badly written the rest of the characters are. I love to send snippets of the outlandish dialogue to my friends. I enjoy picking apart the plot to expose all the holes. (Where are the editors?) I love to hate it. The writing is awful, but each book gets a tiny bit closer to good writing.

At Grave’s End opens with Cat’s exposed Red Reaper identity causing problems for her team. Despite having presumably limitless resources and copious amounts of data about vampires that they could use to track them, Cat’s secret government agency has been using her as bait to entice vampires in bars like she’s been doing since she worked solo. (What exactly does Cat do that another attractive female soldier couldn’t do?) Cat has become too recognizable; either her targets see her before she sees them and scatter or they run when they realize who she is. As an afterthought, it’s tacked on that this way has been risking the lives of civilians. In the first scene, a vampire gets spooked and uses bar patrons as bullet shields when the agents start shooting at them in a crowded bar. Bones tells Cat in the first book that the only ways to kill a vampire are with silver through the heart or decapitation, but these vampires are afraid of bullets.

This is an unconstitutional, poorly managed, wasteful government-run operation. When they’re not directly killing vampires (who needs due process?), they’re holding them captive to siphon their blood partly to engineer Bram and doubtlessly perform experiments on them. They’re only supposed to be targeting “bad” vampires who have killed people, but there’s no explanation for how they’re chosen. I suspect more than a fair number of innocent vampires have died at the hands of Cat and her team. This is vigilante justice at its best and witch hunting at its worst. Cat mentions how tax dollars are usually spent on buying her endless gin and tonics while she’s out baiting vampires. It’s highly unlikely that her job would allow her to drink while on duty (she’s carrying a gun!) or that her job would pay the bill. Nor would the government fund repeated shootouts in public places, no matter how you spin it.

The solution they come up with is to use Belinda, one of the vampires they’ve held captive for years, as bait instead of Cat, and instead of performing a sting operation in a bar, they’re doing it in a Chuck E. Cheese because child civilians are apparently less vulnerable to bullets. Cat is present during the sting despite her recognizable presence being the entire problem. It’ll come as no surprise that she messes up the sting, jeopardizes the safety of all the children and adults in the building, and then she kills the vampire dressed as Chuck E. Cheese. Now there’s a bunch of scarred children, one of her teammates dies, one of the vampires gets away, and Belinda makes a run for it in the commotion. Cat ends up catching up with Belinda and kills her for her disloyalty. I remember a similar scene in the second book in which Cat’s actions lead to the death of a different teammate, Dave. I reiterate from a previous book review, how is Cat qualified to not only be a part of this team but to command it?

Piggybacking off the fact Cat and her team expose children to a deadly shootout with vampires, children are handled oddly in this series. Annette has a tragic backstory which she tells with zero emotion of giving birth (possibly Bones’s baby) and the baby dying when the cord choked them to death. Ethan is the child pretending to be Cat’s son during the sting operation at Chuck E. Cheese. Cat doesn’t even ask where Don got a child actor.

Ethan turned out to be an orphan, which explained why his parents hadn't strongly opposed the part he'd played as my son. I made Don promise never to use him or any other child again for something so dangerous, and to find him a good foster home. If Don could run a secret branch of the government to fight the undead, finding a foster home for an orphan shouldn't be too hard.

Bones asks Cat to marry him. They’re already vampire married but now he wants them to be human married. Their wedding plans keep getting thwarted.

Max, Cat’s (un)deadbeat daddy, is still trying to kill her for existing. You would think he would have given up or moved on at this point but three books into the series and he’s still trying to kill her. Max vampire hypnotizes Justina, Cat’s mom, into inviting her over to Justina’s house where Cat is subsequently kidnapped and tortured. She’s shot in the stomach and the only side effect is she’s walking a little sluggishly and dripping some blood. She remarks how it’s great the shot missed her vital organs because otherwise she’d be moving slower. The abdomen is terrible spot to be shot in. It’s full of vital organs, and it would be difficult to miss one of those organs.

Another wave of light-headedness swept over me. I must have been bleeding internally, since what was now leaking out onto the floor didn’t account for how I felt.

            Because Cat is a half-vampire, she heals quicker than a human does but much slower than a vampire does. Even with that in mind, Cat’s torture doesn’t make logical sense. She was shot in the abdomen and leg, had both of her hands pinned to the floor by knives, had more knives stabbed through her wrists, had her skin flayed, had her arm burned, had her lip split open, was kicked in the abdomen, and was punched repeatedly in the head. She’s still fully conscious, her eyes are not swelling shut, and she’s lost a minimal amount of blood. Then later, she rips her hands out from underneath the knives, and she’s unable to use her hands because of how damaged they are. That is, until Bones heals her. Every time Cat gets hurt, even minutely, Bones cuts his hand and feeds her his blood to heal her. Cat gets hurt, Bones heals her, repeat. She’s never injured for more than the time it takes for Bones to feed her his blood.

So many emotions were surging in me. Relief, delayed panic, anger, exhilaration, and the urge to clutch Bones and babble about how thrilled I was to even see him again. But there wasn’t time for a meltdown, so I stuffed those feelings back. Get it together, Cat. Can’t have you turn into a mass of psychological goo, there’s too much to do.

Tate, Cat’s second-in-command, asks Bones to turn him into a vampire out of the blue. Both Bones and Cat assume that Tate wants to become a vampire in a thinly veiled attempt to lure Cat away from Bones. They tell him what they suspect and why it won’t work. He even admits that’s why he wants to become a vampire. I’m going to equate this to plastic surgery for a moment. Bones is performing an elective, irreversible surgery on Tate (changing him into a vampire). While plastic surgeons are under no obligation to perform mental health evaluations on their patients, they can choose not to perform a surgery if a patient is exhibiting red flags. Bones is fully aware Tate is doing this operation for the wrong reasons and that Tate will be unhappy with the results when it doesn’t get him what he wants; however, he performs the procedure anyway. At the very least, it’s morally wrong.

Not that morals seem to play a big part in anything anyone does. In the previous book, Tate sexually assaults Cat, and she tells him she doesn’t see him as anything other than a friend. In this book, he steps up the sexual harassment:

“Do you know why I won’t shut up about how I feel about you? Because I didn’t say anything for years. We were friends, but I kept hoping with time, more would develop between us. I’m not making that mistake again, hesitating when I should have moved forward. I don’t care if it pisses Crypt Keeper off or makes you uncomfortable, I’m done pretending that I only want to be your friend.”

Slam the brakes. Do not pass go. None of that is okay, particularly the part about him not caring that hitting on her makes her uncomfortable. If something you’re saying to someone makes them uncomfortable, you need to reevaluate what you’re saying and to whom you’re saying it to. He’s harassing her, after she’s made her feelings for him known, under the guise of seizing the moment. I would forgive the first time he laid his feelings out on the line for Cat but after Cat let him down, he should have stopped. He’s not respecting her wishes. Cat shouldn’t be his friend based on the way he’s acting, nor should he still have a job with the secret government agency unless Cat has never reported his behavior to Don, her boss.

This book briefly demonstrates a misunderstanding of BDSM and its culture. Cat goes to a vampire swingers’ bar/S&M club with two of her coworkers posing as a trio to track down vampires involved in killing humans. I guess they’ve forgotten for the moment that the Red Reaper has been outed. She watches a man slap a woman so hard that her mouth starts bleeding and then the woman moans and asks for more. Cat describes seeing more people beating each other up throughout the club. I feel like play that involves blood is probably highly controlled in this type of environment.

I believe the author didn’t do her ancient Egypt research before writing this book. Two of the main characters are ancient Egyptian, Mencheres and his wife Patra. Mencheres is described as having waist-length black hair and pale white skin. Cat pegs him at roughly 2,000 years old. The last native-born Egyptian pharaoh lived 2,315 years ago (at the time the book was published, which is presumably when the book is taking place since it isn’t stated otherwise), so that’s the minimum age Mencheres or Patra could be. There was a real-life Egyptian king named Menkaure (Hellenized name Menkheres) whom Mencheres the character might be based off who lived 4,507 years ago—his tomb is the smallest of the three pyramids of Giza. Patra is stated to be Cleopatra’s daughter, and Cleopatra did have a daughter named after her, Cleopatra Selene II. She was a princess of mostly Greek and Roman ancestry who lived 2,012 years ago. Patra the character is described as having a Middle Eastern accent by Cat. All of this could be a way of showing how little Cat knows about history, but I doubt it.

The plot is patchwork like the last book. One conflict comes up and then it’s resolved, and then another conflict come up and then it’s resolved on repeat. After Max is dealt with, Patra comes onto the scene. Mencheres is Bones’s grandsire, as in the sire of his sire, Ian. My favorite phrase occurs when Cat calls Mencheres “vampire granddaddy.” Patra, who is a Master vampire in her own right, is attempting to kill Mencheres by attacking Cat in her dreams as revenge for Mencheres killing her lover thousands of years ago. Way to hold a grudge, right? Then Bones is reputed to be dead when his teammates leave him behind while attacking Patra.

I find Cat’s actions following the news that her husband has died unrealistic. While it’s true grief is different for everybody, her responses seem weird. She yells at everyone who speaks to her. She buries a knife in someone’s chest because they touched her forearm to get her attention. It’s so over the top. If she’s angry, have her smash something or scream until she loses her voice. Then she storms off into an unknown (to her) location and climbs a cliff. She briefly thinks about killing herself but is talked out of it by Vlad, Bones’s sort-of enemy. He tells her she needs to act like her vampire half instead of her human half to forge ahead and exact revenge on Patra for killing Bones. It’s like a switch is flipped and she’s angry but able to move forward (with the plot). She goes on to comfort Annette, Bones’s former lover, in her grief over losing Bones. It doesn’t make sense. Grief has many forms but none of them involve solely being rude (which is a normal character trait for Cat) and climbing cliffs to kill yourself and then shaking it off in the next moment.

For about three chapters, Bones is dead and then suddenly, he’s alive, worse for wear but alive. Cat’s response to finding out her husband is alive? She quits her dangerous job, which wasn’t possible for her to do in the first and second books but for some reason is possible to do now, to become a full-time wife. Cat doesn’t seem like a character that would enjoy being a housewife, and she makes the decision out of the blue. The story is written in first person, meaning the reader is privy to Cat’s every thought, and she’s never thought about quitting before.

Their relationship is toxic anyway. Cat makes out with Tate during a mission to distract a vampire before she kills him. Later on, she and Bones are talking and it’s emphasized that they agreed that she would do these kinds of things for the sake of the hunt. Then this happens:

“He kissed you here.” Bones’s voice was a low growl. “I suspect he touched you here”—he touched my breasts through my shirt—“and I can smell his hands here”—while kneeling and running a hand along the outside of my thigh.

I didn’t move, holding myself still the way prey does while it tries not to catch the attention of the hunter.

It’s totally normal to be afraid of your husband, right? Bones performs oral sex on Cat immediately after that. Cat wants to talk things out and can sense that he’s mad, so she’s not initially into it. She doesn’t fight him, though, and they have sex. In case you need clarification, Cat isn’t consenting because she’s scared of Bones’s ire, meaning the sexual activity they engage in is sexual assault. It turns into consensual sex but how it begins is wrong and uncomfortable to read. In the end, it’s made to seem like it’s okay because Cat generally likes having sex with Bones.

It was the best fight we’d ever had.

Also, they’re obsessed with each other. People can’t even look at Cat without Bones throwing them up against a wall and threatening to mutilate them. That’s not love. That’s obsession. Cat does it right back to women who look at Bones. Their relationship is unhealthy, and it makes me angry to think there are people out there who have read these books who look up to their relationship as a goal they want to reach with their partners.

            Justina Crawfield, Cat’s mother, has a personality overhaul in this book. She goes from being a religious-y vampire-hater to approving of Cat and Bones’s upcoming wedding, participating in the torture of Max, and dating a ghoul. She even starts wearing revealing clothing.

“I can see all the way up to your thigh. My God, if Grandma saw you now, she'd come right out of her grave!”

My mother opened her mouth, paused, and then smiled. “I won't tell if you won't.”

            I’m all for character development but there isn’t any here. She’s not even showing the aftereffects of being tortured and watching her daughter be tortured by the man she claimed raped her. She goes back on this claim in this book, claiming she was horrified that she had sex with him after realizing what he was, as if that excuses being a bigot and forcing your daughter to be a murderer.

            If there’s one thing I can positively say about these books is that they’re chock full of offensive words and phrases. At a meeting to buy explosives, Dave, one of Cat’s teammates, mocks the seller’s wares:

“I'm supposed to go back to my client and tell them maybe the trigger mechanism will work or maybe it won't, praise Allah and it will. You stupid amateurs. There is so much shit for sale now, I don't need to pussy around with this Blue Light Special quality at Rembrandt prices, so fuck off and have a nice day.”       

When it’s believed that Bones is dead, some vampires who swore allegiance to Bones take issue with having to be ruled by Cat in his stead. One such vampire challenges Cat, and then Cat mocks his Irish accent by saying he sounds like the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

It sounded like a Chinese fire drill upstairs. People were screaming, footsteps were thundering up and back, and there were more of those popping noises that were like nothing I’d heard before then.

Not only did Cat use an offensive phrase (“Chinese fire drill”), but it also doesn’t even correctly explain the situation, which is supposed to be simply chaotic. The original meaning of the phrase has to do with things getting lost in translation so that people do dumb or nonsensical things. It would be one thing if a character said something because that’s the kind of person they are. It doesn’t seem like characterization when all the characters say racist, sexist, or transphobic things.

My last note is a critique of the vampire names in these books. There’s no consistency. Some vampires go by nicknames, and some go by their birth names. The nicknames always seem random and have an implication that they’re correlated with something personal to the vampire. Here are some vampire nicknames from the books so far: Bones, Hennessey, Spade, Switch, Majesty, Hatchet, Two-Chain, Rattler, Zero, Tick-Tock, Domino, Talisman, and Doc.