Since the Prince of Darkness has forbidden the Dracul to kill humans (though not to stop drinking blood), he makes the trip to the States to stop what’s going on. In Romania, however, an academic at the University of Bucharest, Lucien Antonescu, discovers that girls are being killed in New York who appear to have been drained of blood. The reader is introduced to Meena on her way to work, on the subway, encountering a tourist from Eastern Europe whom she knows will die by the end of the week: in a perhaps vain attempt to change the girl’s fate, Meena gives her a card and tells her to call if she needs any help. She’s also a psychic who, after meeting someone, can tell how and when they’re going to die. Meena Harper (yes, the nods to Dracula are intentional: her brother’s called Jon…) is a thirty-year old dialogue writer for a trashy daytime soap opera called ‘Insatiable’.
Insatiable jumps on the vampire-lit bandwagon, but Cabot does something a little more interesting with it.
They’re light, humorous and fluffy reads which don’t pretend to much depth, but are well-written enough to propel the characters through often fantastic plots.
The protagonists of her adult novels are a bit more realistic, struggling with early-career jobs and relationships I do rather like The Boy Next Door and Boy Meets Girl, partly for the inventive method of narrative – told in emails, messages, scribbled on receipts and menu cards – as well as the rather sweet love stories which enfold along with the rest of the plot. Her heroines tend to be fairly ordinary girls, though they don’t ever seem to have money worries and they have happy family lives, even if they have talents which make them worth writing a series about. Meg Cabot is best known for her young adult and kids’ books, particularly her ten-strong The Princess Diaries series, but she’s a prolific author of light, often romantic stories which do also manage to grapple with the difficulties of teenage life (well, if you happen to be American and wealthy, anyway).
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