Book Reviews

Book Blurb

Luca Dell’Oro has developed an unusual but successful event planning business. His specialty is Italian Weddings and Funerals, which is also the name of his highly sought-after Mendocino, California, business. He accepts an unusual assignment to fly to Rome, Italy, to cater a funeral for an Italian opera singer. Nothing goes right from the minute he accepts the assignment. Cookware goes missing, and his most trusted employees mysteriously can’t go with him, leaving him with a motley crew for a staff.

Luca is stunned to find the grieving widower happens to be a man Luca met and lost to the deceased woman—in sixteenth-century Italy. Luca has good reasons for still being around. He’s a vampire, and all his recipes and magical ingredients have been carefully cultivated over the years. But just who the hell…or what the hell…is Francesco Savelli and does he want Luca—or does he want to kill him?

First edition published by Extasy Books in March 2011.

Second edition published by Amber Allure in June 2014.

Book Review

I absolutely loved this book. It's one of the funniest vampire books I've ever read. It's much more usual (In my experience) to find 'serious' bloodsuckers, so reading about Luca and Franco was a delight. It starts off with the premise of having an ancient vampire run a business that caters for weddings and funerals. A bit of an odd combination, I thought, but Luca pulls it off with panache. Both are major life events, after all, and adding the Italian theme to it just made it even more fun. My favorite quote was when Luca asks his ex-lover about some of the differences between 'general vampires' and Italian vampires:
“And you all eat food?”
He stared at me a moment, the smile leaving his face.
“We’re Italian. Of course we eat.”
That says it all.

Right from the start it's obvious that there is more to Luca than meets the eye. His astute observations about his fellow, ehm, humans, are very funny, but there is a depth to him that is only explained when he gets a call from Franco and we find out about their long-ago love affair. The deep feelings that re-emerge very quickly when the two meet again had me spellbound and hoping they'd manage to stop miscommunicating.

Italian Weddings and Funerals is a wonderful mix between humor and a fascinating vampire love story. The secondary characters are amazing additions to the story and make it come alive even more, and the brilliant descriptions of the settings had me wanting to book a flight to Rome. If you like unusual romances with a lot of flair and some great laughs, you will definitely like this book.

 

 

 

 

DISCLAIMER: Books reviewed on this site were usually provided at no cost by the publisher or author. This book has been provided by Extasy Books for the purpose of a review.

Additional Information

Format	ebook
Length	Novella, 71 pages/21959 words
Heat Level
Publication Date	10-August-2018
Price	$3.99 ebook
Buy Link	http://www.extasybooks.com/italian-weddings-and-funerals/