Night Promises by Tonya Renee Callihan

What do you do when you find out vampires are real and become best friends with one? Why, open a night club catering to their needs of course! But Night Promises are what happens when someone murders Kelly’s sister and the cops can’t help find the true killer.

Kelly‘s secret life of owning Night Pleasures has gotten her sister murdered. Now she must team up with the vampire she has loved for months, to find the killer.
What happens when their passions motivate their decisions?

Kelly O’Keefe owns half of the vampire club Night Pleasures. Her partner is her best friend, Mac, who also happens to be a vampire. They have known each other since Mac saved Kelly from an attack when she was twelve. Now Kelly is blaming herself for her sister’s murder because she is the one who introduced her sister around the club, even if her sister fit in with the crowd. She is now determined to find who killed her sister.

Connor has been a vampire for two hundred years. His sire and best friend, Micah, comes to warn that he heard in Kelly’s thoughts that she plans to investigate her sister’s death. Connor can’t believe that she would do something so risky! He believes Kelly is his life mate, but they both have been avoiding doing anything about their mutual attraction. He is worried he might not be able to control himself and thus would end up changing her (into a vampire) against her will. He doesn’t know why she resists him, but he does know that she doesn’t date or donate blood to any vampire. But to protect her, he will find whoever hurt her sister. If only he can convince her to back off and keep safe?

Night Promises I am sorry to say falls short. It breaks the first short story rule of trying to do too many things in too limited a time. This leaves us feeling Kelly is either ADD or not true to her feelings over the murder of her sister and the ‘fear’ of being with the vampire she claims to have been in love with for months but has resisted all this time. Rule number one of good short stories is to focus on one main issue but here we have life mates/true love, Kelly’s sister’s murder, if the vampire life mate can keep from turning Kelly against her will, Kelly’s distrust of men, and the story is side tracked with the erotic element as well. All of these could play off each other well in a full length novel, but they are too much for only 38 actual written pages. I can’t decide if I am happy about the bad guy or not. It was not the expected or obvious one, which I like, but we didn’t have any clues or time of clues for the bad guy and I don’t like the “out of nowhere” solutions. Still not sure about this…

Night Promises does have a nice set-up. There are standard vampires and we don’t get caught up in any weird world building. Kelly and Connor connection is believable and their friends are very supportive. The clue idea may be old but vamps would need something and this one is believable as well. I do like that Kelly’s best friend is fighting her ‘life mate’ connection to Connor’s best friend (for all the good it will do her in the long run).

Night Promises is left open enough for more stories. So it will be interesting to see if there is another one and if it is long enough to fully flush out the characters and story line. There is definitely potential here.