Frosted Blood by Larry Pellitteri

This is a fantasy novel suitable for YA and up.

Michael finds himself an orphan at an early age; his parents taken inexplicably from him. Having been given a crystal from them just before they left, with the explanation that all will be revealed, he spends his school years learning about crystals and extracting them from caves. Fresh from school he is offered an internship at Enbright - the same place his parents used to work. Considering his experience and expertise it seems strange that he would have been picked for the position. As the days go by and the job entails nothing more than staring at a screen, he hopes to meet someone to make life more interesting. Enter a new co-worker named Emma and the sparks start to fly. But with Emma comes a whole new adventure involving secrets, traitors, vampires, Urashi, Atlanteans and possibly a world war. They are just kids! How on earth will they solve this?

The story hinted of great things to come and then the pace slowed down immensely. Later on it picked up quickly again, but by then the story and timeline had gone into so many different tangents that it became convoluted. It was as though the author had a whole lot of different ideas, all of equal merit that he decided would work, so lumped them together in one book. I didn't feel much depth to the main characters: Michael had his hero moments and then would be too scared to do something in case his heart was hurt, Emma seemed a bit flighty when it came to romance and they both seemed to grasp technology and the ability to use vehicles and machinery too quickly. For the part that Christopher played I don't think he was explained enough to the reader, and West and Father John went from good to bad to good to bad. The language used was a bit strange - some very "large" words that are certainly not in everyday use and quite a few grammatical and punctuation mistakes. The story was definitely aimed more at YA - a bit fluffy for adults. Overall a good idea for a story, but too much packed into it caused not enough substance.