The Dead of Winter

What a mind-frak of a novel. Seriously. I'm not sure what to say about it without spoiling anything.

You take a semi-generic Western setting (that's not an insult, just a description) mash it up with a pretty typical UF story (with some novel twists), and you get something very unusual. A good kind of unusual.

I'm not crazy about how abruptly the final battle ended. Nor the main character's use of contemporary slangy terms like, “Big Bad.” But the rest was so good, I can get over that easily. Collins' first work was so good, you can put me down for an automatic buy for the next couple.

This is a mix of a western with vampires and other ghouls. Cora and her husband Ben specialize in ridding towns of these unnatural monsters. When the marshall of Leadville, Colorado, encounters two mysterious deaths, he employs Cora to get to the bottom of it. This story had a nice flow to it and an engaging heroine. It's light reading in that sort of pulp genre and there's an interesting twist involved that really sets it apart from others of its ilk. I enjoyed this and might read the follow-up at some point.