In One Foot in the Grave, Mark Simmons introduced us to his half-vampire character, Chris Csejthe. In Dead on My Feet, Simmons shows us the transformation of Mr. Everyday into an Alpha Vampire who still isn't all vampire.
It's in the blood, so to speak. Csejthe has been infected with one of the two viruses which convert a human into a vampire, and he is caught in the middle - a man adrift between two worlds who is hanging on to his humanity for dear life!
In Dead on My Feet, Simmons brings a whole new cast on stage as he's moved his main character from a little town in Southeastern Kansas to bayou country - Monroe, LA. In that sleepy town we find a sho'nuf fortuneteller, a rogue vampire out for a little fun with Chris, a beautiful damsel in distress, a secretary that's the dream of anyone who ever needed to hire one, a vampire who fought in the Civil War, and a plethora of other fascinating characters.
The villains are equally interesting and a couple of them remind Chris of his all-but-forgotten past in some very unpleasant ways. The arch villain is a real blast from the past, an ancestor - maybe - who has come to Louisiana to do enormous evil, and only Chris can stop her. How he manages to survive any number of attempts on his life, and still defeat the utter personification of evil makes for a very strange and entertaining tale.
With Dead on My Feet, Simmons has flexed his story-telling muscle and moved to the head of the class. This tale is wonderfully entertaining, while at the same time, disqueting and edgy. Highly recommended.

I've been waiting a long time for this book to come out, as I very much enjoyed its predecessor "one foot in the grave". Chris Cséjthe the almost-vampire is back. Now living in Monroe he's working as a part time private investigator and university lecturer, and life is pretty good for him with the exception that his werewolf lover, Lupé, has left him because she couldn't stand the competition from his late wife's ghost taking up Chris's attention.

Things unexpectedly start to unravel for Chris when he takes a case to investigate if a local psychic is the real thing. It turns out she is and she has some dire warnings for him. Then another vampire turns up in town and tries to kill him and the local corpses start turning up on his doorstep asking him to dispense justice for them because he stands between life and the undead - and the local police are NOT impressed.

This is a wise-cracking, literary and fast moving novel. Chris reads like an old friend. Once you start this book you'll want to see how it ends as Chris is pushed to his limits and finds out more about himself and his new powers than he ever guessed.

I'm already looking forward to the next book in this series, and hoping its as much fun as the first two books. If you like your vampire/supernatural novels with a twist that doesn't rely on sex and excessive blood then these books are worth reading, but start with the first book to get the most out of this one. Though I do hope the next book will tie up some threads left dangling at the end of this one. (eg what happened to his secretary and her sick nephew etc)

A year ago, Chris Csejthe (pronounced "Chay-tay") was completely human - then a blood transfusion from the Lord of the Undead changed everything. Now he is a hunted man, sought by human and vampire alike for the secrets he knows and the powers that his mutated blood may bestow. So far he's dodged undead assassins, werewolves, a 6,000-year-old Egyptian necromancer, and Vlad Dracula himself. But now he's really got problems.

The dead are turning up on his doorstep after dark to ask for justice and the police want to know where all those corpses are coming from. Undead terrorists are testing a doomsday virus on his new hometown and he's caught in the crossfire between a white supremacist militia and the resurrected Civil War dead. His werewolf lover, jealous of his dead wife's ghost, has left him. And the centuries-old and still very beautiful (and very deadly) Countess Bathory is determined to have his uniquely transformed blood for her own dark purposes.

Now, more than ever, life sucks!