Medical triumphs

Ah, me. Doing a happy dance and a little shimmy and a minor jig, followed by a subdued 'woot'!

Did the First Aid course this morning, followed by an exam - practical and theory - in the afternoon. Yes, I passed... okay, I kicked butt, with a final mark of, wait for it: 100 per cent! Yay! Toss those wounded bodies at me! I'll fix 'em!

Right. I'm no doctor, it's true, but I now know what to do in emergencies and that can't be a bad thing. Any medical training is useful.

* * *

I finished Lynn Viehl's Stay the Night this evening - eschewing Star Trek: Voyager, mind you - and the series doesn't feel finished. I'm guessing when I read it again, I'll see it, but at the moment... I'll have to think on the ending. I don't, at this stage, see what happened as a solution; but then I want the Brethren to pay a high price for their misguided, evil ways.

Alex Keller continues to search for a cure to the pathogen, an FBI agent is kidnapped by Robin of Locksley - and there is irony in that - Nottingham returns as a man still open to manipulation by the evil of others and his own conscience, and a nasty little psychopath seeks revenge on them all.

Like the others in the series, I enjoyed it, but Lynn presented some tantalising glimpses and leads that could be future books, as if she's keeping the option open to write more should fans demand it. There's so much more that could happen.

I like series to end on an absolute: Cardinal D'orio dead (he so needs killin'), the Brethren dead, scattered or finally see how they were manipulated... but perhaps that's for the new series of Kyndred. The first, Shadowlight, comes out in November and the excerpt at the end of Stay The Night is a temptation I want, nay, need to indulge.

With all the vampire novels out there today, the Darkyn series is a breath of fresh air blowing through the genre with medical reasoning written with absolute conviction to be believable. This is a series I'll be re-reading. It's a stand out in a genre that is both becoming tired as it is popular.

Bring on the next series.