Final Days by C.L. Quinn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Love at first sight doesn’t exist…right? So how could Alisa explain the instant intense attraction to a man she collided with on a lovely night in Paris at a streetside café? She was dying, a diagnosis that left her with perhaps three years left in her life…maybe that was why. Whatever it was, she wanted him and there was no reason not to take this beautiful man and find pleasure she has never known. This journey she was on was a final trip to places she had always loved in this world. To experience life as much as possible while she still could. She’s never done anything like this before, and it turns out to be the memory of a lifetime. The only sorrow she felt while leaving that next morning, was that she may have found love, too late.

Koen’s been alive for over a thousand years. This past year of his life has been wonderful. He couldn’t imagine anything better. Until he has a chance collision on a trip to Paris with blue eyes that burned into his soul, and stayed there. After the most incredible night of his life, she disappeared.

He didn’t know she was dying. She didn’t know he was vampire and could save her life. Would Koen find her…in time?

This fifth in the series about First Blood vampires is wonderful on its own, but follows the fourth book in the series closely, so listening in sequence will bring greater connection with the story and characters.

Final Days

Two for the price of one!

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💚🖤❤️💜🩵
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: ☹️☺😋😘
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Solo Narration

The heroine: Alisa – she was a reporter in Chicago who liked to write about uplifting stories, like a young man named Peter who likes to find the joy in life, despite being a double amputee in the war. She traveled around the world and interviewed high impact people, but what she loved most were stories like the one about Peter. She loved her life, her boss Percy was like family ever since she bullied him into a job at eighteen, telling him she would one day be his best reporter. Alisa had been so busy with her life, that she ignored the symptoms that she was feeling, like stumbling, muscle twitches, and times when her legs wouldn’t do what she wanted. When she finally did go to the doctor, she found out she had ALS and only had about 3 years to live, within that time she would slowly lose the ability to care for herself.

The Hero: Koen – he is a thousand year old first blood vampire, one of biggest and strongest in the world. He was one of the few that had a child, a first blood child who was taken from him until he recently found her again and now she even had her own child, his first blood grandchild. Before he found his daughter Park, he was depressed and nearly ready to throw in the towel on his long life. However, he is now happy with his life and loving having a family. He has even been feeling ready to start seeing women again. When one night in Paris, he runs into a beautiful woman that he feels a deep connection to.

The story: Koen and Alisa meet and spend one beautiful night together in Paris. She had been checking off things on her bucket list before she is unable to do so, and she feels that her night with Koen is perfect, but doesn’t want to taint it with her baggage, so she doesn’t tell Koen that she is dying, she doesn’t have any idea that he is a vampire, who can save her, so she sneaks out while he is away sleeping for the day, leaving only a short note. Koen spends months looking for Alisa, he has many of his team searching all the CCTV footage from the airports trying to find her. When they finally come back with her whereabouts, back in Chicago, he prepares his jet to fly out that same night.

Koen has been a big presence in the previous books in this series. He is basically the leader of his clan of first bloods and regular vampires. I am glad he is getting his own story in this book. I wanted him to find his mate and Alisa is a perfect mate for him. She is strong of mind despite her situation. She didn’t want to sit around feeling sorry for herself, instead wanted to live as much as she could in the time she had left. I can’t imagine getting a disease like ALS. I had a good friend with ALS and it went almost exactly the way it was described in this book. He seemed almost fine, though having some aches and pains when we were together and then within a few years he was gone. It isn’t like cancer, where even if you have a kind with a small chance of living more than 5 years, you can still fight it, like my Dad did, so at least there is some hope. But to have a disease like ALS where there is no hope and no way to fight it, I can only imagine how hard it would be not to drown yourself in the hopelessness of it all.

One thing I really liked about this series up till now was how there was a short, but comprehensive summary of what happened in the previous book or books that pertained to the new one. In this book the first 8 or so chapters were basically a retelling (word for word) plus more of what happened in the last book with regards to Koen and Alisa. It was way too much re-use of the same content I just read since I started this book right after finishing the last. This book was as much the continuation of the story of Jacob and Starla as it was the story of Koen and Alisa. That story was actually a bit better than the story of Koen and Alisa. Though, I did like how the two stories came together and it ended well.

This audiobook was told in multiple points of view via solo narration and was narrated by Pyper Down. I usually don’t like and rarely choose audiobooks with solo narration, but I have really been enjoying this series and the audiobook was a great price after grabbing the book via kindle unlimited. I didn’t mind the solo narration and enjoyed Pyper’s voice quite a bit. I still won’t give five microphones for any book with solo narration, but this one definitely deserved four.

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