Swipe Bite by Alexandra Vasti
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
Swipe Bite follows badass corporate heiress, Sophronia Vega, who is also a vampire. As the heir to HemoCorp Industries, Sophronia takes her work responsibilites seriously and wants the business to continue to grow and be successful.
Most recently, she has led the charge on the creation of Stokr, a dating app that pairs vamps with the right humans that they won’t accidentally eat. Thus far the launch of the app has been wildly successful, that is until the glitch occurs.
When Stokr’s matching technology goes haywire, and vamps start literally draining the life out of their dates, Sophronia’s well-honed career starts going up in flames.
In order to solve the problem, Sophronia calls on Casey Amato, the human software engineer who lead the team that programmed Stokr. Casey’s confident the Stokr failure was no normal glitch. He’s insistent that it’s sabotague.
Further, Casey believes the sabotague has come from the inside, a fact Sophronia doesn’t want to believe. Has someone in Sophronia’s inner circle actually betrayed her?
In order to save the app, and its users, Sophronia and Casey must team up to fix Stokr and weed out the rat, but long hours working together leads to a burning attraction.
Can the two stay focused enough to succeed, or will they end up giving in to a temptation that could be deadly?
While this wasn’t a perfect read for me, I did end up having fun with it. There were a few little quirks that drove me batty, such as nicknames, and the way they swapped Abraham for God a million times, but I think the story itself was fun and I liked getting to know the main characters.
You may be like, Abraham for God, what do you mean?? The vampire characters would say it, like instead of ‘oh my god’ or ‘good god’, they would say, ‘oh my Abraham’, or ‘good Abraham’. It really got me in the sexy scenes though, her just shouting ‘Abraham’. I’m like, who’s Abraham? I thought his name was Casey.
I think it had something to do with Bram Stoker. There were definitely references to him, and in this world he was a vampire, so I don’t know. I guess he was their version of God, but it just felt very forced and would take me out of the story every time it came up, which was a lot.
Besides that though, I thought the plot was fun and I did end up growing to love both Sophronia and Casey. I also liked how much the business and the behind-the-scenes on the app were incorporated into the story.
It looks like this is going to be a series, and the series title is Corporate Bloodsuckers, which is such a fun concept to me. As someone who is interested in business, I do tend to enjoy when an author includes those details.
This was definitely a case of the further I got into the story, the more I enjoyed it. As Sophronia and Casey start to develop their relationship, I found myself becoming quite invested. I also loved the mystery behind what actually happened to the Stokr app.
The ending was fun and left off in a great place for the continuation of the series. I’m looking forward to whatever comes next. It sounds like it’s going to be intense.
Thank you to the publisher, Berkley, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I wasn’t sure about this in the beginning, but I’m really glad I stuck with it.
A light and entertaining read, perfect for Fall Romance!