The Vampire and the Case of the Wayward Werewolf

The Portlock Paranormal Detective, Book 1

By: Heather G. Harris, Jilleen Dolbeare

Narrated by: Alyse Gibbs

Someone paid the vampire king’s creepy son to turn me into one of the bitey undead. I’m not hanging about to find out who or why. The vampires want me to stay with them for one hundred years of indentured servitude but I have this thing about following orders so I ran from the streets of London to the wilds of Alaska.

I have an eidetic memory and a can-do attitude. I can-do anything to get away from the vampire king. So when the Sheriff of Portlock, a hidden paranormal town, invites me to be his assistant, I say sure thing. It beats servitude hands down.

At first things seem ideal in Portlock, I make a new friend and even get asked out on a date. But the truth is, there are secrets aplenty. The paranormal council are at each other’s throats, figuratively of course. But then someone rips out a werewolf’s throat, literally this time.

I need to work with the Sheriff to find the killer, before he strikes again. We just need to winnow through werewolf pack issues, council politics, and more suspects than you can shake a stake at. Simple.

Portlock is a melting pot of witches, necromancers, vampires and shifters, but things are starting to boil over. I hope I don’t get burnt.

Dive into this fast-paced urban fantasy series if you love humor, heart, found family and a slow-burn romance.

Don't miss the other Portlock Paranormal adventures:
1. The Vampire and the Case of her Dastardly Death
2. The Vampire and the Case of the Wayward Werewolf"

©2024 Heather G Harris and Jilleen Dolbeare (P)2024 Heather G Harris and Jilleen Dolbeare

Too bloody good!

Once started, couldn’t stop listening! Narrator is the best! I haven’t been hooked in a story liked this in a long while. Off to the next book!

Good Story, Good Narrator - BAD editing

Let me say right up front that I only made it about half-way through the audiobook before I had to turn it off and read the rest of the book on my Kindle. The Author(s) did a great job on this story. Bunny is a fun character and i genuinely laughed out loud several times.

The Narrator, Alyse Gibbs does a great job, she's does a good job of characters. Most have unique voices, and its very easy to tell them apart.

The problem lies in the spacing between sentences or parts of sentences. Whomever edited the audio files together clearly never listened to the book afterwards. There are soooo many times where this type of pacing happens.

"I took a moment to look over" (2 sec silence) "at the front door that we just locked" (2 sec silence) "to see the largest werewolf I've ever seen."

Also, the gap would range for 1 second to 3 seconds. More than once I thought we were switching chapter only to have the 2nd (or 3rd) part of sentence/paragraph continue. By chapter 25 it was SO frequent, SO random, and SO @#$@#$ annoying that I had to tap out.

I know Audible has fixed bad audio production in the past, and I hope this makes the list, because this looks like a fun series, but I'm not risking another one until I know it was edited by a fan of the James T Kirk school of reading.

Great story so so performance

The story was fun but the narrator seemed new to the job. She read just a tad bit too fast for me. And the editing seemed off with weird pauses and cut offs. I did like how she did accents

Interesting new world and characters

The story is solid and the characters are interesting. I will probably pick up book 2. The Voice acting is solid and her voice is easy to listen to. I have passed on more than one book because I couldn't listen to the readers little girl voice. The production could use some work. There were frequent pauses that impaired the listening experience for me.

I'm hooked!!!!

First Heather G. Harris book for me and I'm already checking out her back list of books. Bunny has had a run of bad luck, and ends up in Alaska working at the Sheriff's office. This was book one so was a bit slow to build but I've gotten to know the characters, the quirky small town and loved it all.
My only complaint at this point is that I have to wait for book 2!
Well written and a stellar performance by Alyse Gibbs

Well written and Immersive

Absolutely love how this was written! The author doesn’t waste time on superfluous explanations but hops seamlessly into the story, skillfully weaving in things along the way. Main character is mature and has some strength without being overpowered. Mystery was engaging and not predictable, but still based on the facts. Love interests were nicely peppered in allowing for some natural interactions that did not eclipse the plot. Looking forward to the rest of the series!

Quick, Light, and Fun

A great light read, with some novel slice of life elements and a fun, engaging mystery. Bunny carries the story!

More cozy mystery than an urban fantasy

This is my second Heather G. Harris series. I think I have to accept she’s not the author for me. I liked the original Other Realm series (read the first 3) more than this one. I haven’t tried the spin-off Other Realm books, and Jilleen Dolbeare is new to me. It’s also possible that I might have liked this better with a different narrator. She’s a good reader, but she reads everything a bit flat regardless of what’s going on. There’s often a lot of weird editing issues—mostly too-long pauses between sentences, as if she’d turned the page while recording and didn’t cut out the dead air between lines. Sometimes the pauses are so long I’ll think the chapter has ended, but then dialogue resumes. The pauses can give a sense of hesitation from a character, or kill the momentum/cadence of a tense conversation. She’ll stumble over words sometimes. Toward the very end of the book, a door slams in the background. All of that paired with storytelling that doesn’t work for me probably means I should just scratch Harris off my list, especially if she’s going to stick with the same narrator for all her series.

The worldbuilding in Harris’s books are interesting and creative on the surface but key details are often missing. It sounds like a lot of details about Bunny being turned into a vampire and how she got her dog Fluffy were covered in the prequel, which I didn’t realize was available until after I’d read book 1 (it’s last on the series list on Audible). In book 1, though, other than Bunny’s fangs showing up at inopportune times and her drinking warmed-up blood, it’s easy to forget she’s a vampire at all. Her only power until 95% into the book is her eidetic memory, but it sounds like she had that prior to being turned anyway. Her being a “weird vampire” is clearly the series’ hook, but it also goes a long way in making this feel more cozy than a standard UF.

Bunny’s job is working as an assistant to a police chief (maybe how she got that job was covered in the prequel too?). Despite having no training—other than her boss telling her frequently that she has “good instincts”—she went from assistant to what amounted to a junior officer very quickly. She was interviewing potentially very dangerous perps on her own within a matter of days. This became some cross between a cozy mystery with an amateur sleuth and a paranormal police procedural. I’m sure that won’t bother everyone (or even most readers!), but when I’m reading something that’s labeled as an urban fantasy, that’s what I want. If I want cozy, then I’ll search for that. It never felt like the book knew what it wanted to be.

There’s a lot of telling in Harris’s books. Choppy paragraphs full of short sentences detailing minutiae. She went here, she did this, she picked this up, she went over there. Lots of declarations about how Bunny is a strong, independent woman who gets on get soap box about how women should be treated (all of which I agree with, btw), rather than *showing* us that she’s a badass. Write her like a badass and she’ll come off like one.

The telling becomes a problem with character building too because the side characters often start to blur together. This also happened in the Other Realm series for me. Characters with very simple names (Jack, Jim, Mitch, Chris) get introduced with very brief descriptions about eye and hair color, maybe their job, or what they were wearing, but nothing wildly memorable, and then when they don’t come up again until the end as part of the “Aha!” moment, I frankly can’t remember who they were, so the emotional impact of the whole thing is gone. Even now, after finishing the book, I can’t remember for the life of me who one of the baddies was.

Oh well. I may still try a Jilleen Dolbeare book.

I want my money back

The book did not hold my attention. The first book was good and this is nothing like it.

Awful narration

The story is good! The narrator read it - not performed it - so fast I had to slow it down in order to understand what she said. That made her sound like a fast talking drunk. Kinda ruined it for me. I will definitely read the rest of the series. In print.