Charlie Huston Brings Pitt Series To Bloody Close

"My Dead Body" (Del Rey, 302 pages, $14), by Charlie Huston: Anyone who's spent any time with Joe Pitt knows how this one's going to end _ with a bloody mess.

The Vampyre hellion at the center of Huston's five-part noirish take on the bloodsucking phenomenon doesn't so much wrap up in "My Dead Body" as it implodes.

Pitt orchestrates a series of seeming illogical fights and feuds among the Vampyre clans of New York City, all in the name of love.

Huston opened the series with the genre-bending "Already Dead," and by the time he finishes with "My Dead Body," he's killed dozens of the undead (who are surprisingly fragile), a few hundred innocent and otherwise human victims and even his angry protagonist _ twice.

And though Pitt's careening through Vampyre society gets a bit repetitive _ Huston could have accomplished the series in three or four books _ it never, ever gets old.

Huston is a master of voice and flow as he has shown in the Henry Thompson trilogy and a handful of standalone books. The pages disappear like a bowl full of mints. Pitt is irresistible as he tries a series of ploys that serve as misdirection as he makes his way to his real destination: his girlfriend, Evie, who is making the transition from late-stage AIDS patient to a cleric-like mystical Vampyre Pitt's forced to leave in harm's way at the end of installment No. 4, "Every Last Drop."

"My Dead Body" begins with Pitt hiding out in the sewers, which gives him a little bit too much time to catch us up on what's gone on so far. When he finally emerges _ tricked by a friend whose daughter has been impregnated by a young Vampyre _ all hell breaks loose. Thankfully.

Pitt exacts some revenge, rights some wrongs, clears the deck of the old guard and, in his strange way, sets things right.