Masters of Death by Olivie Blake – Review

Published: August 8, 2023

Publisher: Tor Books

Series: N/A

Genre: Fantasy

Pages: 416 (Hardcover)

My Rating: DNF @ 50%

Synopsis:
From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes Masters of Death, a story about vampires, ghosts, and death itself!

Viola Marek is a struggling real estate agent, and a vampire. But her biggest problem currently is that the house she needs to sell is haunted. The ghost haunting the house has been murdered, and until he can solve the mystery of how he died, he refuses to move on.

Fox D’Mora is a medium, and though is also most-definitely a shameless fraud, he isn’t entirely without his uses—seeing as he’s actually the godson of Death.

When Viola seeks out Fox to help her with her ghost-infested mansion, he becomes inextricably involved in a quest that neither he nor Vi expects (or wants). But with the help of an unruly poltergeist, a demonic personal trainer, a sharp-voiced angel, a love-stricken reaper, and a few high-functioning creatures, Vi and Fox soon discover the difference between a mysterious lost love and an annoying dead body isn’t nearly as distinct as they thought.

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Masters of Death is a story that began great and unfortunately for me, fizzled out about halfway through. I LOVED the first hour or two of the book where all the various parties are introduced, particularly Viola. Viola was turned into a vampire during a college archeology trip to the Philippines and got a day job as a real estate agent after dropping out. She also turns into a wee little cat at night.

Her current listing is the home of a wealthy man who was murdered – typically not a problem for Viola, except he’s haunting the house. Tom really doesn’t want his home to be sold. This is where Fox D’Mora gets called in to offer his services as a medium. Fox seems just fine at first – sort of an interesting grifter sort, but his defining feature is that he’s the godson of Death.

Sounds like a fascinating bunch of characters, right? Yes! They were great until Brant showed up. He and Fox go way back, like hundreds of years, and have loads of angsty history that you the reader are given in dribs and drabs via interlude chapters. During non-interlude chapters Fox and Brant argue the entire time. The structure of the dialogue is somewhat difficult to follow as it’s literally one line of purely dialogue after another. No “he said” etc. at all and it was honestly rather a turn off especially when paired with the slightly too dramatic narration. I typically like a bit of drama and emotion in my audiobooks, but this was over the top for my tastes.

Overall, I found this book to be intentionally oblique and I absolutely loathed Brant and Fox together. Separate they were fine, but MAN they just bitched at each other non stop as soon as they were in the same room! I think I could have forced myself to finish this book in print, but in audio my annoyance with the story and characters was really noticeable and drawn out so I gave up around the 50% mark.