If Anne Rice's nether-novels on the rise and fall of vampires embodied a sense of humor, and if her central non-breathing characters displayed a love for shoes, Undead and Unemployed would be the resulting work. The great and legendary winged creature of the night has been the focus of an entire warehouse of books, but they're ultimately represented as blood-siphoning, soulless and heartless ghouls who walk up walls, attack the unwary, and turn typically virginal and innocent bystanders into these self-same devils. And they go about their business of feeding and turning and the wheel turns.

The vamps here are well-heeled, smartly-dressed, and sacrilegious individuals constantly taking the Lord's name in vain - which all vampires hate - and more interested in the newest line of Prada than in dental probing.

Christopher Moore is the king of this genre with his line of fiends-with-feelings, but Davidson, in her sophomore effort here, is well on her way to perhaps becoming the queen of the long-toothed stockinged serpent.

A fun excursion that turns evil nightgrowlers into your best friends. Vamps loving vamps, vamps loving non-vamps, and the great Queen of all Vampires searching for love in all the wrong veins. It makes you want to really believe these bat/wolf banshees actually exist so you can find one and fall in love. In their case, for a long, long, long time.