Vampires, Werewolves, and confused teenage girls, oh my! No sparkle here, but a solid plot with solid characters in a curse-ridden town. This makes for a fun read.

Book Title: The Mason Ridge Trilogy (Losing Control; Losing Heart; Losing It All)
Book Author: Erin Danzer
Book Publisher: Self Published
Release Date: Jul 01 2009; May 07 2010; Mar 08 2011 (For each book, respectively)
Retail Price: Paperbacks: $15, $15, $11 (For each book, respectively); Digital: $0.99 (For each ebook)
Buy it at: Various outlets

What was the story about? The first book sets up the overall plot arcs of a town-wide curse on Mason Ridge and the machinations between a werewolf pack and vampire...flock? (What do you call a group of vampires?)

Who were the main characters? - Ashley Holbrook, Tristan Deveraux, and Gabriel Stewart - The supernatural love triangle that gets kinda creepy if you figure in actual age instead of appearance age. A seventeen year old girl swapping bodily fluids between a 500+ year old pointy toothed Don Juan and a 100+ year old wolf in teenager's clothing. Not to mention the mental intrusions of a 300+ year old ghost/poltergeist type girl, whose scorn Hell hath no fury even remotely close to. Ashley's parents have their own issues to deal with, between responsibility, fidelity, and remembering that it's the parents who should be caring for their less-than-a-year-old son AJ and not leaving it to Ashley to handle.

The whole love triangle starts out innocently enough, at least as innocent as a love triangle can be, but evolves as a generations-long curse is revealed to Ashley and it's all on her to break it.

Between Gabriel's vampiric abilities and apparently innate seduction abilities (not to mention "family" of Alyssa, Anni, Lily, and Travis), Ashley doesn't have an easy go of understanding the Holbrook curse, let alone breaking it. Her ancestor Annabelle, who haunts her house, merely complicates things even more.

Each book left off with a cliffhanger, or cliff-faller-offer in one case. And even the climax was shrouded in "Who's going to win?!" dramaticness, which I happen to like. I hoped that the resolution would take care of all concerned parties, and it did.

Readers might wonder why each book gets progressively shorter, and even I was curious when I received the trilogy. But I think it works, when all is said and done. It adds to the growing urgency within the plot of "time is running out." The curse has a countdown on it, threatening to forever shroud Mason Ridge in rainy/snowy depressing weather that vampires crave.

My main eye-twitch problem with the whole series was that, being a self-published series, it could have used another round of proofreading. There were a few typos and random extra spaces here and there. Blame my current proofreading binge I've been on, but that really stuck out. Also, "grimaced" might have been the most used expression in the first few chapters. Which isn't too bad, as it happens to be a fun word to use. But it was pushing on excessiveness after a while. Then again, moving a town in perpetual rain clouds and being courted by a vampire and a werewolf would definitely be grimace-inducing.

I plowed through Losing Control in two days, Losing Heart in one, and Losing It All in one. Not too shabby considering it was just commute times, lunch hours and a bit of after dinner time. It's rare that I spend the extra time to finish a book, rather than just waiting to tomorrow. But the plot kept me flipping pages. I'd recommend the trilogy to paranormal romance readers and those who want a quick fun read.