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Operation Save the Innocent, Tony Ruggiero, 2008, ISBN 1896944604 Part two of a series, this book is about the use of vampires as present-day US Government assassins. In part one, John Reese ran a very high-level military program called Team of Darkness, a team of three vampires ordered to kill selected targets. Led by a vampire called Dmitri, they had little choice in the matter. Around each of their necks was a permanent metal collar filled with a serum, that, at the touch of a button, would be injected into them, and kill them slowly and painfully. At the end of the book, Reese freed the three, telling his superiors that he killed them. In this story, a megalomaniac officer named General Stone secretly obstructed Reese’s efforts to abolish the program. He has also secretly secured two young girls, a 13-year-old and her 8-year-old sister, to be his own personal assassins, with similar collars. They were turned into vampires through a Balkan (southeast Europe) equivalent of the Hatfield’s and McCoy’s feud. General Stone is found dead, murdered by Christina, another vampire, who could be said to have started all of this. She was found in a cave in the Balkans near the end of World War II, and was convinced to come to America. Dmitri and his two colleagues find out about the two sisters, and break them out of a very secure military prison, the same one in which they were held. Reese, supposedly retired from the military, is forcibly recalled to active duty (by an ultra-secret agency called The Agency) with the task of finding them. The alternative is to spend the rest of his life in military prison. He also starts a "relationship" with Christina, and is unaware of her story. This novel does a fine job of combining a vampire story with a political thriller. I am not much of a vampire novel lover, but I am very interested in reading future novels in this series. Paul Lappen is a freelance book reviewer whose website, Dead Trees Review, has nearly 700 reviews on all subjects, with an emphasis on small press books.
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