'Driving Mr. Dead' by Molly Harper

From the BLURB:

HELL ON WHEELS

After failing as a magician's assistant, a photographer, and most recently, a bride, Miranda Puckett takes a position as a driver for Beeline, Half-Moon Hollow's premiere vampire concierge service.

Miranda's assignment? Driving Collin Sutherland, the world's most fastidious vampire from Washington to Kentucky, so he can deliver a mysterious black case to Council official Ophelia Lambert.

Collin, a paranoid, aristocratic vampire with a debilitating fear of flying, refuses to let the case out of his sight. Miranda needs this time on the road to decide whether to permanently cut her ties with the fiance that had an "emotional affair" with a childhood pal, but Collin’s neatnik tendencies are driving her around the bend. The man acts as if leaving a fast food wrapped on the passenger seat is reason for a full-on CDC de-contamination scrub-down of the car. All she can do is promise to stop intentionally doing the things that make his stiff upper lip twitch with irritation.

As more and more mishaps occur on the road trip from hell, Miranda and Collin work together to meet his delivery deadline. Hotel rooms are destroyed. Beloved cars are defiled. And somewhere along the line, client-driver hostilities become snarky flirtation.

Will Collin and Miranda make it to the Hollow in one piece? And if they do, will Miranda leave old, safe relationships behind for something new and well, just plain weird?

Serial rolling-stone, Miranda Puckett, is on the first day of her new job for Beeline – driving vampires cross-country as their personal chauffer. And her first client has perfect timing – providing Miranda with some much needed Washington-to-Kentucky driving/thinking time to sort out her ever-destructive life and butt-dialling ex-fiancé.

It’s just a shame that Miranda’s maiden voyage is with Collin Sutherland. A pretentious, reclusive, up-tight vamp with sixteen-pages of instructions for his chauffer and a silver suitcase that he refuses to talk about.

This is going to be one long road-trip to Half-Moon Hollow . . . and along the way there will be car-boobs, muggings, MC Hammer and Hawaiian shirts. Oh, joy.

‘Driving Mr. Dead’ is the 160-page novella set in Molly Harper’s ‘Jane Jameson’ universe.

What is the appropriate reaction when one of your favourite, funny authors writes a special little novella treat set in her established-series universe? Why, fan-girl squealing – of course! And let me assure you, Molly Harper’s ‘Driving Mr. Dead’ is entirely deserving of your peals of squeals!

Harper introduces us to Miranda Puckett – employee to daytime vampire concierge, Iris Scanlon, who readers met in ‘Nice Girls Don’t Bite Their Neighbours’, and who has her own spin-off book coming out this month called ‘The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires’. Miranda is a wayward soul with itchy feet and an ever-changing résumé. She has been a cruise ship dogsbody and magician’s assistant but her favourite job of all was as professional photographer. In recent years she has tried squeezing herself into a life that pleases her parents – as paralegal and fiancée to the white-picket-fence good boy, Jason. But that’s all gone up in smoke after Jason’s discovered text message, professing his love for his best friend (and Miranda’s maid-of-honour), Lisa. Miranda has taken the chauffeuring job at Beeline, partly to reconnect with her crazy-wild-card roots, but also to take a week or two of space and decide if she can accept Jason’s apology and re-proposal.

Miranda’s first client is Colin Sutherland, a vampire with a silver suitcase, anal-retentive sixteen-pages of chauffeuring instructions and “more issues than National Geographic”. Miranda and Colin get off to a bad, finger-breaking start, and things just get worse from there . . .  but as the miles tick by and the ludicrous bad-luck keeps knocking them around, Miranda starts to shed Colin’s many pretentious layers and get to his deeply hidden sexy centre.

I loved this novella! And I mostly loved it because it’s so Molly Harper. Honestly, I can’t think of any writer I'd trust more with tackling a hilarious, cross-country vampiric road-trip. She just had to write this because there’s nobody else more qualified. Period.

And she does such a darn good job! As if anyone needed proof that Harper has an untapped resource in exploring the ‘Jane Jameson’ universe, beyond her hilarious vampire-librarian heroine, ‘Driving Mr. Dead’ will assuage you of any lingering doubts and get you suitably excited for ‘The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires’. Of course, a few ‘Jane’ favourites make appearances – but I won’t spoil who because their random pop-up is just too delicious!

Miranda and Colin absolutely steal the show in this buddy-road-trip-plot-gone-awry. They are exact opposites; she the wild child free-spirit, accident-prone cool chick. While he’s a stuffy recluse, with some serious old-world appeal;

Last but not least, there was the fact that he was gorgeous in a tortured Byronic, Edward Rochester-meets-Lucius-Malfoy sort of way. He made me want to climb him like a proper British tree, for no other reason than that wrinkling his clothes would annoy him severely and, I hoped, provoke him into spanking me. He made me dizzy. He made my ears ring.
Wait, no. That was my phone.

I love anything and everything that Molly Harper writes. This novella is just the cherry on top of an already brilliant, established paranormal comedy series that keeps readers in blushes and chuckles. Brilliant!

5/5