Certain Dark Things

This is a good book, but not spectacular.

I read this after reading Mexican Gothic. I'm not really a person who sticks to a genre, so any genre differences aren't gonna bother me. This book, on it's own, is good. What shines through the most is the rich world crafted here, in fact, it felt like a lot of worldbuilding went into this book for just one novel.

A look at modern day Mexico, but with vampires as a real thing, and different kinds from different parts of the world was fascinating. While the characters are good, there are quite a few POV characters and some are stronger than others. Domingo and Atl passages prove to be useful while Rodrigo, Nick and Ana parts feel like they're there for plot motion alone.

None of those characters get enough life breathed into them beyond perhaps Nick to make them matter. There's a character death near the end that is supposed to have some impact that instead got me to verbalize a “What? Why?” You can at least track Moreno-Garcia's growth as a storyteller pretty well and see there's a ton of promise here that she builds off of in her later work.