Review: Servant of the Blood (Everly Abbott Series Book 1) by KN Banet

Servant of the Blood by K.N. Banet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Superb New Chapter In The Tribunal Archives

This is the first book in a continuing series that is set in a world shared with several other series. You don’t need to read the other Tribunal Archives books to understand this series, but you’d probably enjoy them! There is no cliffhanger to this book, just a very fine hook for the next book in the series.

Everly Abbott is a Servant of The Blood. She is part of a family that works for vampires and she chose to join the family business after the nest paid for her college education. Her father died 15 years ago and her brother decided not to work for vampires. Her mother works in the same nest as she does and is in charge of the household staff, a very important role. Everly is the person who formed the IT department and introduced the nest to modern technology and how to get around it when necessary. This aspect of her job is a lot more commonly used than it used to be.

After losing the old master of the nest the nature of the vampires living there has changed significantly. Under Jacob, the old master vampire, humans were treated gently and with respect, the new master vampire, Edwin, sees humans as a walking meal unless they happen to be useful to him in other ways. The nest is oppressive and the humans and less violent vampires are walking on a knife’s edge in a bid to remain alive.

Everly in particular is placed in situation after situation where she doesn’t know if she will get out alive or if she can save her friends and colleagues. When she finally finds someone to help she grabs on with both hands.

I will say that this book does not shy away from killing off characters. There is quite a lot of blood and gore described in violent scenes of death. There are lots of twists in the plot which is fantastically paced. It draws you in page by page until you have no space left in your mind for anything other than this world. This author is a tremendous world builder and she has created something violent and bloody in the world the Tribunal Vampires, with brief moments of hope for a better world that we might see in future books.

I love the concept of this book, which looks at the purely human servants of vampires. This type of main character is very unusual and makes the book even more interesting. In any vampire book, there are always ‘useful’ humans who help the vampires and it’s fascinating to see this world from those types of eyes. We witness the darkness of the vampire world but we also see some of the joyful aspects of sharing lives with beings who are hundreds of years old.

I loved this book so much with the feisty character of Everly, who stepped off the pages and became real for me. She was traumatised, suffered from anxiety and grief and she still got back up again. She is protective of not only humans but also vampires that don’t stray towards the darker path of their existence. She’s very bright, hard-working and more capable than she realises. I can’t wait to see how her personality develops as she gains confidence.

This book is as fantastic as others written by this author. I can’t wait to see what comes next, after the way this book ended!

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