One Foot in the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

 

YOU CAN RUN FROM THE GRAVE, BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE . . .

Half-vampire Cat Crawfield is now Special Agent Cat Crawfield, working for the government to ride the world of the rogue undead. She’s still using everything Bones, her sexy and dangerous ex, taught her, but when Cat is targeted for assassination, the only man who can help her is the vampire she left behind.

Being around him awakens all her emotions, from the adrenaline kick of slaying vamps side by side to the reckless passion that consumed them. But a price on her head—wanted dead or half-alive—means her survival depends on teaming up with Bones. And no matter how hard she tries to keep things professional between them, she’ll find that desire lasts forever . . . and that Bones won’t let her get away again.

One Foot in the Grave (Night Huntress, book two) by Jeaniene Frost

Start date: July 2021

End date: July 2021

Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 stars

Trigger warnings: sexual harassment, transphobia, bad writing

It’s been nearly five years since the events in Halfway to the Grave. Catherine “Cat” Crawfield has settled into her new life as Special Agent Catrina Arthur or maybe it’s Cristine Russell or Red Reaper or Brunette Reaper or somehow still Cat despite staging her death under that name. Not even a quarter of the way into the book, everyone gives up on any of the new names and all the characters call her Cat. The reason she needed a new name in the first place is because she killed the governor of Ohio at the end of the previous book, and a prerequisite to working for the secret government agency was to fake her death. Her mother, teammates, and even a new friend, Denise, call her by her old name except when they’re in public, but they don’t even seem to remember to do that all the time. Because of her noncommittal to her new identity, it wouldn’t be difficult for bad guys to track her down (spoiler alert: that’s what happens).

Cat’s work persona is the Red Reaper. Vampires have connected the dots that the Red Reaper is Catherine Crawfield and in turn that Catherine Crawfield isn’t dead. They haven’t realized she’s going by the new name Cristine Russell, but frankly it’ll only be a matter of time before they do based on how frequently Cat uses her dead name. Then a gruesome murder occurs in Cat’s late grandparents’ house. (Why Cat’s late grandparents’ farmhouse with its acres of cherry orchard hasn’t been sold in the last five years if the inheritors are supposed to be dead as well, I don’t know.) Blood on the walls spells out “here kitty, kitty,” which Cat takes to be a taunt from her former lover, Bones. Cat keeps her theory to herself because sharing information with her boss and team is so passé. Cat’s boss, Don, believes the murderer is a vampire trying to smoke Cat out (you think?), and he doesn’t want Cat to go near it for fear of revealing her new identity. Cat brushes off his concerns with a convincing argument:

“[W]ith my hair shorter and brown, I look very different. No one would recognize me now.”

Throughout this book, everyone has this belief that changing your hair color and style and/or wearing colored contact lenses changes your entire appearance to the point that no one you used to know would recognize you. I’ve dyed my hair before, but never have I had someone not recognize me while looking me in the face because of it. On top of that, Cat only changes her hair after letting a vampire she was hunting go at the beginning of the book, so it’s implied that Cat didn’t even change a thing about her appearance in the last five years. She’s supposed to be in a sort of witness protection program (despite that program only being used to protect witnesses who testify in court, not people who kill high-ranking officials). She should have been given a new name, job, and appearance and been told to maintain a low profile so as not to tip anyone off about her whereabouts. Instead, Cat changes nothing but her name (and she’s not very strict about that), and her new job has her doing the exact same thing she did before she joined the team.

In Halfway to the Grave, Don states he works for “a unit in the FBI called the Paranormal Behavior Division…that investigates the unnatural occurrences of homicides” and that it’s “a combination of CIA, FBI, and the armed forces.” In One Foot in the Grave, Cat says she works for the FBI as a “an extension of Homeland Security.” Clearly Cat has no idea where her paychecks come from since those are two separate entities. Bear with me for a moment here while I explain the differences between them. The mission of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the federal law enforcement agency, is to “protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States,” prioritizing “protect[ing] the U.S. from terrorist attack; protect[ing] the U.S. against foreign intelligence, espionage, and cyber operations; combat[ing] significant cyber criminal activity; combat[ing] public corruption at all levels; protect[ing] civil rights; combat[ing] transnational criminal enterprises; combat[ing] significant white-collar crime; [and] combat[ing] significant violent crime” (https://www.fbi.gov/about/mission). The mission of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the federal executive department, is “to secure the nation from the many threats [it] face[s]…from aviation and border security to emergency response, from cybersecurity analyst to chemical facility inspector” (https://www.dhs.gov/about-dhs).

It would make more sense for this fictional unit to operate within the FBI rather than Homeland Security because they seem to mainly pursue vampire serial killers, which could theoretically fall under “significant violent crimes” if the crimes were also federal crimes. In real life, after determining a federal crime has been committed, federal law enforcement officers identify and arrest the suspect and then place them into custody pending court proceedings. Cat’s team identifies the suspects and then kills them, sidestepping the criminal justice system. Surely if there’s room in their government for a paranormal behavior division, there’s room for a paranormal court system to ensure that innocent vampires aren’t being murdered.

My personal problems with this secret government agency aside, Cat has no qualifications for not only joining the FBI but commanding an entire unit of soldiers recruited from “the military, law enforcement, FBI, [and]…the criminal justice system.” Don forces her into accepting the job supposedly because she catches his unit’s attention when her vampire slaying is uncovered by corrupt officers. In case you need a refresher, halfway through Halfway to the Grave, Cat is attending Ohio State University (OSU) for her third year of college (so presumably in a baccalaureate program). It’s never stated what her major is. She has a deadly encounter with a classmate from her physics class, so it’s safe to assume she’s majoring in a science or engineering, not criminology. Regardless, she doesn’t graduate because she must fake her death (and leave behind all those hard-earned college credits) when she joins the “secret ‘Homeland Security’ unit.” Why does Don think her being a half-vampire makes her qualified enough to work for him, let alone put the lives of his soldiers in her hands?

            Let’s take a minute to talk about Cat’s team of expert soldiers. Tate Bradley is Cat’s second-in-command. He has an infatuation with Cat that crosses into sexual assault early in the book. After a night out drinking, Tate kisses and gropes Cat. She isn’t romantically interested in him (but she does comment that he’s Brad Pitt-level attractive for some reason).

“I just had to kiss you tonight, no matter what happened afterward.”

He also says something later that could be viewed as transphobic:

“First you casually admit to having a vampire boyfriend, then you tell everyone I tried to fuck you. What’s next? You going to whip out a dick and say you’re really a man?”

Cat’s entire team is rife with sexual harassment. Juan (no last name) is an offensive Latin lover stereotype. His dialogue is peppered with random Spanish words and phrases that seem more like direct translations from English words and phrases instead of things an actual Latino person might say. He came to Cat’s team as “a penal code graduate” who was serving time for “chopping cars.” He comes onto Cat aggressively and repeatedly despite her being his boss. She plays it off like, “Oh, that’s just Juan!” instead of the serious sexual harassment it is.

“You tell me how many orgasms you want, and I promise to deliver. I’ll give you a whole new definition of the term smooth criminal, querida.”

“We’re not blowing you up before I get a chance to show you my sausage.”

            Then there’s Cooper, who gets his entire backstory spelled out conveniently through dialogue:

"I know it's only been two months since we brought Cooper on, but he's smart, fast, and ruthless. His years as an undercover narcotics officer probably helped there. He's performed well in training operations, so it's time to see how he does in the field."

            He doesn’t trust Cat because she’s a half-vampire, but at least he’s not openly insubordinate. He does make a comment that would 100% not be okay to say in a professional environment, though.

“The only pussy here is yours, Commander.”

            Men seem to fall all over themselves for a piece of Cat so it should come as no surprise that when Cat hits a cat and brings it to an emergency pet hospital, the vet, Dr. Noah Rose, asks her out on a date. (Side note: even though Cat adopts the cat, she never names the poor animal, only referring to it as “my cat.”) Cat’s initial reaction is to set him up with Denise, who then later ditches Cat to force her to go out on the date with Noah herself. Cat seems to reluctantly date him…for three months. She dates him for that long despite thinking they should break up because she’s waiting for him to make the first move and dump her. (It's like she’s passing the time until Bones will reappear.)

I already knew we wouldn’t work, no matter how great of a person Noah was. There were too many lies between us, all mine, of course, and the bottom line appeared to be that I still wasn’t ready to let go of my former doomed relationship. Hey, at least I’d tried. Now I had to let Noah down gently. I’d already told him I understood if my schedule was too difficult for him to handle. Either Noah was stubborn or he wasn’t taking the hint. I had to start employing more concise methods, but I wasn’t about to just say, We’re through! and hang up on him. I liked Noah, and I hated the thought of hurting him.

Despite being a couple-centuries-old vampire bounty hunter, Bones can’t find Cat. He stumbles into her the day of Denise’s wedding. Bones is Randy’s groomsman, and Cat is Denise’s maid of honor. Traditionally, weddings have at least one rehearsal but possibly since the couple were only dating for two weeks before becoming engaged and then there was only one month between the engagement and the wedding, they decided to forego that. Regardless, there’s set-up on the day of the wedding where these two should have crossed paths already, yet they reunite as Cat walks down the aisle. It’s a heavy-handed way of foreshadowing the vampire marriage that occurs at the end of the book.

            The major drama after the initial will they/won’t they of Cat and Bones getting back together involves a hit on Cat, which everyone believes is because of her vampire hunting. There’s also a problem with the vampire Cat let go, Ian (who happens to be Bones’s sire). It turns out that he’s yet another man who wants a piece of Cat after she proves herself to be a rarity he would like in his collection. I wish there was more said about either the hit on Cat or the things that Ian collects. Instead, there’s a lot of sex that completely ruins outfits. It’s at this point I realized the books were supposed to be paranormal romance instead of urban fantasy.

            The person with the hit on Cat turns out to be none other than Cat’s (un)deadbeat dad, Maximillian "Max" Williams. His motives don’t seem to be anything more than a pseudo late-stage abortion. There are two “Big Bad” characters that have vastly different motives for wanting to get a hold of Cat. I’ve noticed that these books are like short stories combined to make one novel. First there’s the story of Bones and Cat reuniting, then there’s the hit on Cat by her father, and then there’s the attempted abduction of Cat by Ian. Each one leads into the other instead of being interwoven. Bones and Cat are reunited, Max is thwarted about halfway through, and then Ian becomes the big problem at the finish.

Bones devises a clever scheme to break off from his sire to form his own vampiric line. In doing so, he can claim possession of Cat (since he drank her blood first), thereby ruining Ian’s plot. Cat wrecks this plan, in the stupidest way, by demanding to fight Max, who happens to be vampire child of Ian’s, to the death per vampire rules. By doing this, she unknowingly admits to being a vampire, a child of Max’s, and a grandchild of Ian’s, making her his property like the rest of his vampires. Bones is forced into doing something brash like, I don’t know, marrying the dumb redhead in front of all the vampires in Ian’s line to finalize his claim.

Bones uncovers that Don is Cat’s biological uncle since he’s the brother of Max, clouding his motivations for forcing Cat to join his group. There’s a reveal that drinking vampire blood, which Cat and her team have been doing for a while, prolongs life. Cat convinces Don to add Bones to their secret government agency. Dave, a teammate of Cat’s who dies at the beginning is turned into a ghoul, which is sort of like a vampire or maybe a zombie. It’s hard to pinpoint. Also, I hate the title, One Foot in the Grave, because having “one foot in the grave” means you are “halfway to the grave,” which is already the title of the first book in this series.