Thirst No. 1: The Last Vampire, Black Blood and Red Dice By: Christopher Pike (Book Review)

 (There will be spoilers in this review)

Summary:

Alisa has been in control of her urges for the five thousand years she has been a vampire. She feeds but does no kill, and she lives her life on the fringe to maintain her secret. But when her creator returns to hunt her, she must break her ow rules in order to survive. Her quest leads her to ray. he is the only person who can help her; he also has every reason to fear her. Alisa must get closer to him to ensure her immortality. But as she begins to fall in love with Ray, suddenly there is more at stake than her own life...

When it comes to vampire novels, most of the time said vampire is a powerful and strong male who protects the damsel in distress. With this one, however, we have Alissa Aka Sita who is a five thousand year old vampire that is powerful, intelligent and kicks ass. And she has to protect her male counterparts. Now, that is a story I can absolutely appreciate. Funny enough, this was written by a male author. 

I believe it was a smart move to have a mixture of the present story and flashbacks from when she was human, she first became a vampire and different experiences she went through throughout her five thousand years on Earth. It keeps the story interesting and constantly moving. One thing that I absolutely despise is when a story keeps dragging on. I understand that sometimes we keep on one particular event or topic to process and understand what happened but there is such a thing as overdoing it. Or you get these authors explaining a scenery for 10-15 pages. I get it! The room is fucking blue! We all get it! Point is, Pike did an excellent job with the structure. As soon as a big event was over something else kept the story moving along. And it didn't feel overwhelming! It very much was captivating and made me want to read more. It was like "Holy Shit! It keeps getting more and more intense." 

I did in fact learn something new and it was about the original Aryans. Essentially, they were a tribe of people who were blond and blue-eyed that migrated to Northern India about 3000-1500 BCE. In the book, Pike puts 3000 BCE but I did a little research of my own and it's not all conclusive as far as dating goes. 

Being introduced to Sita, it starts off small with a PI reaching out to her stating hat she is not who she seems to be which was a young woman really well off. Fast forward to Sita finding out her 'maker' Yaksha was after her wanting to end her life due to the promise he made to Krisna thousands of years ago. Sita broke hers by turning Ray into a vampire when his life was in jeopardy. Yaksha, abandoned his quest on ending Sita's life and instead decided to just end his own. He was blown apart but yet being the first vampire he survived the blast and got in the hands of a sicko named Eddie. 

Eddie ended up digesting Yaksha's blood and injecting it continuously so he can become a vampire and stayed as strong as possible. Unfortunately, Sita lost Ray due to confronting Eddie and killing 'all' the vampires he created. During this time she comes across FBI agent Joel who tried to help her take down Eddie but instead got turned into a vampire when he was on the brink of death. Right after getting rid of Eddie LAPD tried to capture both Sita and Joel and take them into custody.

It seemed that one of Eddie's 'creations' was captured by the US military and has been experimented on. They were trying to understand vampire DNA to forever change human kind. Sita being the kickass heroine that she is was not captured but Joel unfortunately was. I love that in every situation, Sita is able to devise a plan to escape and be the winner. Even being stuck in a military base with a warhead ready to detonate and a bunch of military grade weapons pointed at her and she still escapes with her life in tact. After consuming Yaksha's blood, Sita started gaining new abilities and the one's she already had started expanding. She literally became see through and flew away but was unable to bring Joel with her which I personally think is for the best since the more vampires are left alive the more problems can arise.

I find it unfortunate that time and time again Sita keeps losing someone she gets close to. I know a lot of people will complain about how she easily falls in love. But we have to look at it from her perspective. She's lived for so long that it's only natural when she feels a connection with someone to go all in. Forever is very long when you have unlimited time and living such a lonely life. I at first thought that she needed to relax with all these guys that she 'loves' but I put myself in her shoes and understood why she got so attached as she did. 

One thing that was strange was the fact that Andy was actually Arturo, someone from Sita's past and she didn't even recognize him. He was the first to experiment on vampire blood and trying to modify human DNA with vampire DNA. He had this contraption where using crystals and energy, he can modify DNA and transcend beyond being just a human but possibly turning a vampire into a human. We were left on a note of uncertainty whether Sita became human or not when she used Arturo's 'machine'. 

Rating:

I am going to give Thirst No 1 5 stars on 5. This has been an amazing read, so captivating and the fact that there is so much more left to learn about Sita is awesome. We were left on a huge cliffhanger and that is enough motivation to read the second book in the series. I highly recommend everyone to read this book. I absolutely loved it and it was so well put together.