Immortally Yours, by Lynsay Sands

It's been years since I've read one of Lynsay Sands's vampire romance novels, but they have always stood out in my mind: in her long-running Argeneau series, vampires are not the result of dark magic or whatever, but rather the products of blood-powered nanotechnology first developed in Lost Atlantis. The quality of her individual installments might vary, but Sands gets all the gold stars for coming up with such a delightfully weird premise.

In Immortally Yours, Sands's protagonist is 175-year-old vampire Beth Argenis. Beth is a Rogue Hunter—a kind of vampire cop—and her life is going pretty smoothly: she has great friends, she's good at her job, and, with the help of time and therapy, she's overcome the suffering she endured as a human. The biggest fly in her ointment is her longstanding crush on Cullen “Scotty” MacDonald, an ancient vampire who seems convinced that Beth is an idiot... although readers will easily guess that his seeming contempt is a cover for far different feelings.

Immortally Yours centers around a genuinely compelling emotional conflict: Scotty wants to literally wipe away Beth's memories of her traumatic past—allegedly because he thinks she would be happier, but really for his own peace of mind. Beth (quite rightly) feels that her past is an inescapable part of who she is, and has no desire to forget anything. Unfortunately, while the author introduces this conflict, she gives up on it far too quickly. Rather than build her plot climax around Scotty and Beth's fundamental differences, she wraps up their argument in a single conversation and falls back on a forgettable action-and-suspense sequence for the book's final act. It's an adequate ending, but far more generic than the first four-fifths of this novel deserved.