Tag: May Day

BOOK SPOTLIGHT: May Day by Josie Jaffrey

I’m very pleased today to welcome The Ultimate Blog Tour for May Day by Josie Jaffrey—the 2021 Book Blogger Novel of the Year award. I read and blogged about this a back in 2020, so I’m just going to post this spotlight and point you to the feed of @BBNYA_Official, where you can find the reviews for this tour. They’re written by some great bloggers and they’ll be worth your time.

May Day Tour Banner

Book Details:

Book Title: May Day by Josie Jaffrey
Series: The Seekers, Book 1
Publisher: Silver Sun Books
Release date: July 9, 2020
Format: Ebook/Paperback
Length: 392 pages

About the Book

If the murderer you’re tracking is a vampire, then you want a vampire detective. Just maybe not this one.

It’s not that Jack Valentine is bad at her job. The youngest member of Oxford’s Seekers has an impressive track record, but she also has an impressive grudge against the local baron, Killian Drake.

When a human turns up dead on May Morning, she’s determined to pin the murder on Drake. The problem is that none of the evidence points to him. Instead, it leads Jack into a web of conspiracy involving the most powerful people in the country, people to whom Jack has no access. But she knows someone who does.

To get to the truth, Jack will have to partner up with her worst enemy. As long as she can keep her cool, Drake will point her to the ringleaders, she’ll find the murderer and no one else will have to die.

Body bags on standby.

May Day is the first book in Josie Jaffrey’s Seekers series, an urban fantasy series set in Oxford, England.

Book Links:

Amazon UK ~ Amazon US ~ Amazon Canada ~ Goodreads

About the Author

Josie Jaffrey
Josie is the author of multiple novels and short stories. Most of those are set in the Silverse, a pre- and post-apocalyptic world filled with vampires and zombies.

She is currently working on a range of fantasy and historical fiction projects (both adult and YA). Ultimately, she hopes to be a hybrid author, both traditionally- and self-published.

After finishing her degree in Literae Humaniores (Classics) at the University of Oxford, Josie wasn’t sure what to do with her life.

She slogged through a brief stint working for an investment bank in London during the 2008 credit crunch, then converted to law and qualified as a solicitor specialising in intellectual property. She worked at a law firm for five years before moving to a UK-based international publisher in 2016. Whilst she loved law, in the end she didn’t love it quite as much as writing, which she now does almost full time.

Josie lives in Oxford with her husband and two cats (Sparky and Gussie), who graciously permit human cohabitation in return for regular feeding and cuddles. The resulting cat fluff makes it difficult for Josie to wear black, which is largely why she gave up being a goth. Although the cats are definitely worth it, she still misses her old wardrobe.

Visit the Author Website.

I received the material for this spotlight as part of the 2021 BBNYA competition and the BBNYA tours organised by the TWR Tour team.

BBNYA is a yearly competition where Book Bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors. If you are an author and wish to learn more about the BBNYA competition, you can visit the official website www.bbnya.com or twitter @bbnya_official.

The sign-ups are now open for BBNYA 2022 for authors and panelists. Click here to enter:
https://www.bbnya.com/how-to-enter/author-sign-up
https://www.bbnya.com/how-to-enter/panellist-sign-up

May Day by Josie Jaffrey: Even Vampires Need Law Enforcement

May Day

May Day

by Josie Jaffrey
Series: Seekers, Book 1

eARC, 388 pg.
Silver Sun Books, 2020

Read: September 14, 2020

What’s May Day About?

Our protagonist and narrator is a Silver, Jack Valentine. Silver’s the term that vampires in this reality use to describe themselves. But she’s no ordinary Silver, she’s a Seeker—essentially a vampire police detective. She and her colleagues in Oxford witness a Silver throwing a mortal to their death from a tower but are unable to immediately apprehend them.

Jack is forced to team up with a local baron—with whom she has a long-standing grudge–to gain the necessary social access to properly investigate the killing. Along the way, she finds a vampire who is molesting mortals (who, thankfully, won’t remember anything) and stumbles onto a conspiracy that may be too much for Jack and the other Seekers to adequately deal with.

A Great Idea

A group of vampires tasked with keeping the existence of vampires secret, erasing evidence of their existence whenever possible, and bringing reckless and criminal (by vampire, not mortal, standards) vampires to heel is a great idea. In retrospect, I’m surprised no one has thought of this before*.

* I realize I’m leaving myself open to correction on this point, if others have done this—let me know, I’d like to see other takes on this idea.

Jaffrey goes even a step further and gives us political intrigue and possible corruption in the upper echelons of both the Seekers and other bodies. The sort of thing that Harry Bosch would call “high jingo.” Establishing the Seekers and introducing some high jingo in a way that feels both realistic and mysterious is a nice accomplishment.

A Question of Emphasis

It’s entirely possible (perhaps probable) that word/page count would put the lie to this section. But I’m emphasizing on how it seemed to this reader—what my experience was. But I’d say that the crime/investigation story (the part that the Book Blurb talks about) is about 40% of the book. The other 60% focuses on Jack’s personal life (and a little about the personal lives of her colleagues).

Jack’s a relatively young vampire and is regarded as pretty immature. Which is fitting, because she is. She drinks to excess, regularly, and to an extent that threatens her job. She gets involved in a love triangle (or at least a lust triangle) that the text spends an awful lot of time on. The side of the triangle that Jaffrey spends the most time on—and gives the most details about—is the one that Jack tells everyone who asks (and the reader) repeatedly that she’s not interested in, and is dead-set against.

The idea of a cop (or cop-like character) who is a mess, both in their professional and personal life, is nothing new—and at times seems de rigueur. It’s just those sub-plots (however integral to the overall story they may prove) should serve as a support to the main plot—it’s right there in the “sub.” They should illustrate who the protagonist is, show them in a different light than the main plot (perhaps help explain who they seem to be). Here, it’s almost as if the May Day murder is the subplot.

So, what did I think about May Day?

I liked the concept of the Seekers, I thought the entire case was well-conceived and well-executed. The two (maybe three, it depends how you want to count them) other ongoing problems that Jack and the others uncover were both exactly the kinds of thing that “Vampire cops” should get into and both leave plenty of fodder for follow-up volumes. This part of the novel is strong, inventive, and is why I recommend May Day.

What tempers my enthusiasm is the balance of the book, Jack Valentine is an interesting character, but her love life and her personal dysfunctions and self-destructive tendencies are overemphasized. I’m very likely in the minority here, I realize, but spending as much time with the mess that is Jack’s personal life—especially when you throw in the triangle—it leaves me cold and sucks out some of my appreciation of the novel as a whole. I do recommend this original slant on Urban Fantasy, and think that UF reader will find a lot to enjoy in its pages.


3 Stars

My thanks to The Write Reads for the invitation to participate in this tour and the materials they provided.

BOOK SPOTLIGHT: May Day by Josie Jaffrey

I’m very pleased today to welcome The Blog Tour for May Day by Josie Jaffrey. This Tour Stop consists in this little spotlight post and then my take on the novel coming along in a bit. Let’s start by learning a little about this novel, okay?

Book Details:

Book Title: May Day by Josie Jaffrey
Publisher: Silver Sun Books
Release date: July 9, 2020
Format: Ebook/Paperback
Length: 388 pages

Book Blurb:

If the murderer you’re tracking is a vampire, then you want a vampire detective. Just maybe not this one.

It’s not that Jack Valentine is bad at her job. The youngest member of Oxford’s Seekers has an impressive track record, but she also has an impressive grudge against the local baron, Killian Drake.

When a human turns up dead on May Morning, she’s determined to pin the murder on Drake. The problem is that none of the evidence points to him. Instead, it leads Jack into a web of conspiracy involving the most powerful people in the country, people to whom Jack has no access. But she knows someone who does.

To get to the truth, Jack will have to partner up with her worst enemy. As long as she can keep her cool, Drake will point her to the ringleaders, she’ll find the murderer and no one else will have to die.

Body bags on standby.

May Day is the first book in Josie Jaffrey’s Seekers series, an urban fantasy series set in Oxford, England.

Book Trailer:

Purchase Links:

Amazon UK ~ Amazon US

My thanks to The Write Reads for the invitation to participate in this tour and the materials they provided.

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