Victoria Tyler's detective job with the Collins Bay PD depends on her finding the serial killer the newspapers are calling the Bay Gnasher. When another young woman turns up dead, Tori finds a key at the scene bearing the name of a local Vampiro nightspot. Somehow vampires are involved in the killings, but since she's a cop and the only unbound woman in the city who knows that the mafia-like Vampiro exist, she won't be able to get into The Scene without Michael's help.

Michael is the local Garante (enforcer), a man Tori hasn't been able to forget since he saved her life two years ago. Now, he has some sort of power over her that goes well beyond normal vampiric tricks. Despite her aversion to vampires, he makes her heart pound and desire flutter so hotly in her belly that when she went to thank him for saving her life and walked in on him taking blood from another woman, she'd tried to kill him in a shocking fit of jealousy. She hasn't spoken to him since.

Tori is the only woman who's ever made Michael lose control. She has no idea that he began the bonding process of the vincolo with her the night he saved her life. When she comes to him asking for help getting into The Scene, he knows it's his chance to win her heart. Plus it gives him an opportunity to finally confront Castillo, his padrone and The Scene's unscrupulous owner, for control of the city. But for Michael to protect Tori, she must let him complete the vincolo . Without it, she would be Castillo's for the taking.

What a great beginning to Angela Cameron's Mafioso series, vampire style! Michael is a thoroughly original story that is as spine-tingling as it is erotic. The plot is fascinating and multifaceted, with a nice balance between brutality and integrity, violence and compassion. I especially loved Ms. Cameron's fresh take on vampires, with their intricate network of hierarchy and laws. While her bad vampires are evil through and through, the good ones can be just as bad and just as lethal under the right circumstances. She made them just bad enough to whet my appetite for bad boy heroes.

I was completely absorbed in Michael and Tori's passionate affair, with its problematic history and how they finally began to work through their issues. Ms. Cameron has me hooked! I'll be reading her sequels, Jonas and Blane, as soon as I can pick them up.

Reviewed by: Merrylee