Book #63: Kiss of Death

Title: Kiss of Death (Book #8 of The Morganville Vampires series)

Author: Rachel Caine

Date started reading: April 26, 2012
Date finished reading: April 28, 2012

Publish date: April 2010
ISBN: 978-0451229731
Number of pages: 256

Official summary: Vampire musician Michael Glass has attracted the attention of a big-time producer who wants to cut a demo and play some gigs -- which means Michael will have to enter the human world. For this, he's been assigned escorts that include both a dangerous immortal as well as Michael's all-too-human friends. And with that mix of personalities, this is going to be a road trip from hell... (http://www.morganvilletexas.com)

How I obtained the book: Checked out of library
Update: I ended up buying a new copy of the book via eBay for $1.47. Must have a copy as a trophy on my bookshelf, after all...

Memorable quotes:

• "The Goth look usually didn't go well with hysterical giggles, unless they were evil giggles, but somehow Eve managed to pull it off." ~ Claire
• "You taste like tacos." ~ Shane
  "You taste like barbecue." ~ Claire
  "And that's a win-win! How about some brisket tacos?" ~ Shane
  "That is so wrong, you know. Brisket does not go in tacos." ~ Claire
  "Twisted, yet delicious." ~ Shane
• "Jason is not some stray mutt you can take in and feed, okay? He's psycho." ~ Shane
• "Jason's done his time in jail. Sitting at the same table isn't like swearing eternal brotherhood. ... Unless he uses a taco as a deadly weapon, he hasn't got much of a shot." ~ Claire to Shane
•  "You do crazy crap, you know. And it's contagious." ~ Shane to Claire
• "The universe explodes, hell freezes, and Shane does something reasonable." ~ Michael
• "In Morganville, when you're not one of the sheep, and you're not one of the wolves, you'd better be one mean-ass junkyard dog." ~ Jason
• "Morley speaks fluent threat." ~ Shane
• "Brute force. It's what I do." ~ Shane
• "You've got this chick flick hit-by-the-romance-hammer look. Stop it." ~ Shane to Claire
• "You couldn't be romantic if your life depended on it." ~ Claire to Shane
• "One of these days, you're going to be too clever for your own good, Claire. You do realize that." ~ Oliver
• "Giving up is always easy. It's the peace that follows that sucks." ~ Shane
• "(Claire had) manipulated the second most powerful vampire in town into taking her side against a psycho bitch-queen sorority girl. She'd talked rationally about putting people's brains into computers. This was a normal day. No wonder she was screwed up." 
•  "I know it's a disguise, but you even suck at being a hippie." ~ Eve to Oliver
• "Even for a vampire, you're a ray of sunshine." ~ Shane (sarcastically) to Oliver
• "Wow. Who got up on the wrong side of the coffin this evening?" ~ Eve about Oliver
• "Damn. That was stupid, wasn't it? We nearly got killed over ice cream." ~ Eve
  "Another thing I don't want on my tombstone." ~ Shane
• "I knew no self-respecting small Texas town would shut down ice cream service at night." ~ Eve
• "Eve, horror movies are not documentaries." ~ Michael
• "Why does everybody think we're so insane? Honestly, we're nice. Not everybody our age rolls with anarchy." ~ Eve
  "You would, if anarchy offered free ice cream." ~ Michael
• "Scared people do stupid things. Drunk, scared bullies do even stupider things." ~ Michael
• "If an old woman can't make her own grandson get out of bed before dawn to do her a favor, there's no point in living." ~ Linda
• "You don't get fired in Duram; you get embarrassed." ~ Linda 
• "You're just Little Miss Optimist, aren't you? Do you come with accessories, like a glass half full and lemons to make into lemonade, too?" ~ Eve to Claire
• "My dad used to say that life's a journey, but somebody screwed up and lost the map." ~ Shane
• "I've never been in love, and more and more, I'm glad I haven't. It seems to make you foolish, as well as very tiresome." ~ Oliver
• "My army consists of one unreliable criminal, one girl with a disability, and one incredibly foolish young vampire with a tanning issue. I am not confident." ~ Oliver
• "Thanks to a thorough education in Morganville -- Survival 101 -- she always assumed there were bad guys around every corner." ~ Claire
• "Use your superpowers or something!" ~ Shane
  "I'm a vampire, idiot. I don't have X-ray vision." ~ Michael
• "You staked a vampire with a number two pencil." ~ Shane
  "I didn't actually check the number." ~ Claire
  "Have I told you lately how freaking awesome you are?" ~ Shane
• "We're in the middle of a three-sided vampire war. Which would be an awesome video game, but I'm not really interested in playing for real. I like my reset buttons." ~ Shane
• "Claire, if I didn't love you, you'd share me." ~ Michael
• "Of course I'm a killer, girl. Don't be stupid. It's my nature. We're predators, no matter what Amelie likes to pretend in her little artificial hothouse of Morganville. We kill to survive." ~ Morley 

My commentary:

•  This book has my favorite of the book covers, at least so far. But I can't figure out who the chick is supposed to be. I can't figure out who supposedly has pink hair. Pink is mentioned a couple times in the book, so maybe it's just reminiscing on that instead of being a direct representation of a character. The official website for the book series says it's supposed to be Claire, but I don't get it. She doesn't have pink hair. She tries a wig on at a store in this book, but it didn't say that the wig was pink. The wig was just "streaked." I don't get why this bothers me so much. I gotta let it go...
• This is the last of the smaller books in the series. The first 8 books are all fairly small. The books after this one, starting with the ninth book, begin getting bigger. I'm excited for the larger books.
• I absolutely love how tacos and barbecue keep coming up throughout the series. It's definitely fitting for Texas (or Oklahoma, where I'm from), and it provides for a few humorous scenes in the books. There's also a funny bunch of interactions in this book when Eve decides she wants ice cream.
• As with the seventh book, this one didn't really have a cliffhanger... unless you count Amelie calling to threaten them about coming back to Morganville. I don't count that. I mean, it was always obvious that they were going to go back no matter what. I don't think she needed to call and demand they go back.

Buy on Amazon.com: Kiss of Death (Morganville Vampires, Book 8)