Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston

Review by Alexius White

I am a big fan of urban fantasy novels. Charlie Huston’s Joe Pitt series is one of my favorite vampyre series. That’s vampyre with a “y” not an “i” because this isn’t Twilight. Joe Pitt is everything you want in a vampyre without all the teenage love drama. Every Last Drop delivers all the twist and double plays readers and new comers have and will come to love about the series.

Every Last Drop is Charlie Huston’s fourth installment in the Joe Pitt series. The novel picks up one year after the last novel, Half the Blood of Brooklyn. At the end of the third novel Joe being Joe is angry at just about everyone in Manhattan. As a result,  he is exiled from the island. Like the other novels in the series, Every Last Drop is told through Joe Pitt’s viewpoint. We feel his anger and rage when things are going crazy or when the bad guys go far too far. The pace of the novel is gripping while Joe’s dark wit, quick tongue and the unexpected twists that keep popping up keep the readers glued to the page.

Every Last Drop takes places over a few nights and spans different areas in Bronx, Manhattan and Queens, and introduces a new, rather odd, character : Amanda Horde.  To keep the review G rated let’s just say Amanda is crazy. She had crazy parents. They drove her crazy. As if that was not enough, she has seen things that’s drove her further down the crazy lane (read the novel for the R rate version, its better J).

Terry Bird also appears in this novel. I must say that, after finishing the book,  I have much better understanding of the character, and might just have found out  whether he is good or bad guy. Not to give anything away let’s just say that Terry is good at talking a lot and not saying anything.

The Count is still alive and crazier than ever in this novel. If Amanda is crazy then the Count belongs in an asylum for the insane from the 1920s. Instead of roaming free, he should be locked in the secure section of a nut house that generously doles out electroshock, preferably every hour on the hour. In every novel one wish for him to die, but he keeps disappointing me, though may be not this time, read the book to find out …

The novel also introduces two other new characters:  Skag Baron Menace, leader of the Mungiki clan of vampyres feared by everyone and usually described as savages, and Esperanza Lucretia Benjamin, the self appointed vampyre in charge of the Bronx.

Dexter Predo also shows up, to everyone’s delight. He deserves a place on the top five list of favorite bad guys in urban fantasy. Apart from being the leader of the Coalition, the largest vampyre clan in Manhattan, Predo is unabashedly bad and cold blooded in a bizarrely attractive way. Here is a short peek at the guy, straight from the book, he ” …breeds lies. He spawns them asexually, with no need for any assistance. He exhales and lies fill the air. Alone in a room, he mutters lies to himself to keep from falling into the trap of truth telling. In the day, sleeping in his bed, deep in the safest heart of Coalition headquarters, he dreams in lies. The better to keep his left hand from knowing what betrayals his right has planned.” Lovely, isn’t it? Yet, how could one resist him?

The novel’s beginning let’s you believe that the main topic is going to be something I will not reveal, but it skillfully takes you on in another direction altogether. And then , surprise !

Nothing, and I do mean nothing, could have prepared any reader for what lies ahead.

After closing the book, I found myself looking around my house and for a moment, just one moment, I forgot that what I was looking for was in the novel, not in the real world. That freaked me out.

The novel deserves five stars at least.