• Hardcover: 320 pages
• MaryJanice Davidson’s Website
• List Price: $24.95 US/$31.00 CDN
• Publisher: Berkley Hardcover (July 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425234355
• ISBN-13: 978-0425234358

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Vampire Queen Betsy Taylor is having a tough time getting through the Book of the Dead-until the Devil strikes a bargain. She offers Betsy a chance to finish the cursed (literally!) thing, and finally discover all its mysteries. There’s just one catch…

Betsy and her half-sister Laura have to go to Hell long enough for Laura to embrace her dark heritage (after a rebellious youth of charity work) and finally make nice with her mother, aka Lucifer. That means interacting with their family’s past. In doing so, they’re impacting the future in ways they never anticipated. Of course that’s what Mother wanted all along. Damn her.

Undead & Unfinished is the 9th novel in the Queen Betsy series & I can honestly say I wish I had skipped straight to the last few chapters. If there was ever a character I wanted to stake, after reading Undead & Unfinished without a doubt I would have staked Betsy.

Betsy wants to read the Book of the Dead, but it kinda makes any vampire who reads it insane. So when her half-sister Laura wants to go visit her mother (Satan) in Hell (Laura is the Antichrist) Betsy tags along & makes a bargain. She wants to be able to fully read the Book of the Dead, since the book has always been right about everything in the short glimpses she’s had of it. Satan agrees & Laura is sent with Betsy to figure out how to jump time, little do they know they are impacting their futures, which is exactly what Satan wanted.

At the start of the book & really for the first 100 pages, we get a recap on what has happened in the previous 8 books. Fans really didn’t need that, this is supposed to be a light PR which doesn’t require a recap so intense, mostly filled with Betsy’s ego. The book ends up coming off as boring & truly annoying…it pains me to say that as a fan, but I have to be honest with you all. I can usually read an MJD novel in hours, this took me near three days, nothing gripped me & made me want to keep going other then the fact it was an MJD novel & I couldn’t DNF it.

I was happy to get my hands on a copy of this book a few days in advance, little did I know this was one of the hardest reads I’ve ever had to struggle through. I am a huge fan of MaryJanice Davidson, but something happened & this book just killed me to read. Between Betsy’s constant designer name dropping, to a whole new level of “It’s all about me”, I really hated Betsy in this novel. She was so self-centered & full of herself, by the 100th page I was ready to quit reading. I couldn’t do that to MJD, she’s been one of my favorite authors since I started reading PR but by god this was killing me.

There wasn’t as much of MJD’s humor, while there was humor most of it just wasn’t funny. While I understand why this book had to be written, it really could have been made into a short story which would have made Betsy not as annoying. There is a shocker when you find out just who wrote the Book of the Dead, but again this could have all been done in a short story, it dragged too much. Did I mention Betsy is so completely self absorbed in this book that you may want to stake her?

If you are a fan, I’d wait for the paperback edition…cause really it was a disappointment.