Review: Daylighters (Morganville Vampires, #15)

Author: Rachel Caine
Series: Morganville Vampires, #15
Released: November 5th 2013
Publisher: NAL Hardcover
Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Buy: The Book Depository

While Morganville, Texas, is often a troubled town, Claire Danvers and her friends are looking forward to coming home. But the Morganville they return to isn’t the one they know; it’s become a different place—a deadly one…

Something drastic has happened in Morganville while Claire and her friends were away. The town looks cleaner and happier than they’ve ever seen it before, but when their incoming group is arrested and separated—vampires from humans—they realize that the changes definitely aren’t for the better.

It seems that an organization called the Daylight Foundation has offered the population of Morganville something they’ve never had: hope of a vampire-free future. And while it sounds like salvation—even for the vampires themselves—the truth is far more sinister and deadly.

Now, Claire, Shane and Eve need to find a way to break their friends out of Daylighter custody, before the vampires of Morganville meet their untimely end

As Rachel Caine pointed out herself, it’s bittersweet to say goodbye to Morganville, but at the same time, the goodbye has come not a second too soon. The Morganville well has been drained of its very last drop of entertainment, left with nothing but sweet memories to give.

While I was never the biggest Morganville fan out there, I’ve been following the series happily and eagerly from its very beginnings. We’ve had some good times and we’ve had some bad, but as with all things that belong to the past, in time, only the good will be remembered.

In the 15th and final installment of Morganville Vampires, the town faces a human enemy. The Daylight Foundation has arrived, imprisoned the vampires and turned most of the human residents firmly against their former rulers. But although their cause seems reasonable at first glance, protecting humans from vampires isn’t their ultimate goal, and Claire, Shane and Eve have to find a way to fight them while Michael is locked up with his kind. Claire struggles with the morality of her decision to side with vampires, especially since the citizens of Morganville seem safe and content for the very first time.

If forced to use a single word to describe Daylighters, ‘boring’ would probably be my first choice. I saw this book mostly as something I needed to suffer through in order to get a satisfactory ending for the characters I’ve grown so attached to. The plot itself didn’t offer anything new and it was surprisingly unemotional, with the exception of the ending, of course. My favorite thing about Daylighters was that Caine finally returned to a single point of view.

If you’ve read the previous book, you might remember Shane being bitten by a very strange dog. Caine neatly developed that storyline in Daylighters, but then just as neatly swept it under the rug, which gave me the impression that she only introduced it because she didn’t know what else to do to fill the pages.

As for the ending, everything that happened has been hinted at several times, so I pretty much expected it, but that didn’t make it any less sweet. I am perfectly happy with how we left the Glass house gang, and everyone important got some sort of closure. Caine left no loose threads.

This is perhaps the longest series I stuck with, and I’m not sorry. All things considered, it’s a fairly good one, always entertaining if not exactly original or particularly well written.