After the slight disappointment of volume 3 and not having a copy of the fourth in the series, I picked up this one not sure what to expect. It started off very promisingly and different to others: after Miranda, daughter of protagonists James and Lydia Asher is kidnapped by the vampire Master of London to force Lydia to work for him and find for him a vampire rival who has moved onto his patch (James is out of the country), the focus is on Lydia and how she has to manage which includes calling once more upon the services of Don Simon Isidro, a vampire since Elizabethan days. Both she and James are decidedly ambiguous about their relationship with Simon, who has on several occasions put his existence into jeopardy for them and been injured in the process yet whom they can never quite forget depends upon murder for his existence - for in Hambly's take on vampires it is the psychic energy released by the death of the victim which is just as essential for vampires as blood.

Where the story lost momentum for me was after James returned from abroad. There were a lot of characters to juggle - Lydia is having to chaperone a niece who is 'coming out' in society while keeping quiet about her daughter's abduction and how she is spending her time doing research - luckily she is able to hire the services of some private detectives for some of the legwork - and so there is interaction with a whole host of aunts, including the awful Aunt Isobel, a domestic tyrant, plus a Suffragist friend of Lydia's. Add to that the whole circle around an American businessman, his daughter, her suitor, his friend and the complications that stem from them as well as from various groups of vampires, James coming off worst in a couple of encounters with the latter and also from a would-be Van Helsing. It didn't help that some of the names were too similar - Noel and Ned for example.

There was a big plot dependency on a book, the eponymous one of the title, and the various versions of it in existence and which were correct and which written by which historical character. This seems to be the Necronomicon (a key book in H P Lovecraft's fiction) of Hambly's series and if it is such a huge source of vampire mythology and vampire hunting etc it is a bit strange that it first appears so far into the series.

The story started to drag about two thirds of the way through though it did pick up towards the end. However, the motive of one of the characters love for his daughter was rather too similar to the motive of a self-sacrificing character in volume three and so the 'twist' as to why a certain person was recruiting vampires was a bit of a deja vu. Therefore only a 3 star rating and, unlike the first two in this series, not for me a 'keeper'. ( )