EVERY LAST DROP by CHARLIE HUSTON

If you haven't been reading the Joe Pitt vampyre novels, then don't read beyond this paragraph. Instead you should go get Already Dead and prepare to burn through the rest of the Joe Pitt books (No Dominion, Half the Blood of Brooklyn, Every Last Drop) toot-fucking-sweet. And don't be fooled into thinking Charlie Huston's vampyre (sorry, it's how it's spelled in the book, probably the ONLY thing lame about the whole series) universe is similar to the other shit floating around in the toilet bowl that is current vampire media (looking at you True Blood and Twilight). Huston's books are hard-fucking-boiled noir before they are anything else, and with the latest - the penultimate in the series - Huston out does himself in the depravity department. This is rough stuff delivered smoothly via his stream-lined no-bullshit prose style.

Okay, so for those of you left, let me give you a quick rundown of where Pitt's at since we last left him in Half the Blood of Brooklyn. In the year since the previous novel, Pitt's been laying low in the wasteland that is the Bronx, a burrough where there is damn near no organization whatsoever to be had. In other words, Pitt's had to resort to more desperate ways to acquire blood. But not that desperate. He's still looking out for psychos to kill, crazed vampyres who risk exposing them all with their reckless bloody feedings. In fact, chasing just such a gang of vampyres is what brings him in contact with Lament, a sadistic child-abusing vampyre who gives his charges ridiculously sad monikers like "Low" and "Pathetic." Lament is apparently in the employ of Dexter Predo of Manhattan's Coalition and Predo makes a trip across town upon Pitt's capture. He's got a proposition for our hero.

Remember pretty little rich girl Amanda Horde and her pre-op tranny vampyre girlfriend Sela? Well, Amanda has started up her own clan called Cure and she's taking in any and all vampyres. Predo wants Pitt to be his mole within Cure and give him a heads up on how close Horde is to discovering a cure for the Vyrus, if she's going public anytime soon - stuff like that. In exchange for his service he gets his hall pass back for Manhattan. Thus Joe Pitt comes back to "civilization."

From there Pitt gets in way over his head and plays all sides against each other and generally fucks up everybody's shit. He also takes a horrifying trip up to Queens to visit the wild Mungiki gang (for those keeping score at home, Staten Island is the only borough Pitt has yet to cross into by my count).

Basically, Huston is setting everything up for the out-and-out war that we'll no doubt encounter in the final novel. There is a lot of expositional dialogue in this entry but it is generally okay because nobody does dialogue better than Huston (bold, I know, but true). There is plenty of violence and gore in Every Last Drop (an obscene amount once you get to Queens) and some fucking HUGE secrets are revealed, but it really feels like he's setting you up for the big pay-off that promises to come down upon us in the upcoming last book. More so than any of the previous three books, Every Last Drop doesn't really work without having read what came before, hence why I told you, uninformed-readers-still-reading, to stop reading after the first paragraph otherwise none of this will make any sense to you.

But I guess in another way, if you HAVE read the first three, you don't need a review to tell you to read the living shit out of this one. Thing is, because the release dates of Charlie's books got switched around, it's most likely going to be at least a year and a half before the final Pitt book comes out.

Shit.