Diana decides that Matthew is fishy and she’s going to research him on the internet.  No, really:

On the Internet, below an unrelated link to a murder mystery and the unavoidable hits from social-networking sites, a string of biographical listings looked promising

Not even Google or something, just ‘on the Internet.’  Did she just open up IE and find the whole internet spread out before her?

Given the level of research we’ve seen so far in this book, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the author can’t properly describe an internet search.  If she could, I’m sure we’d be told which kitschy holiday logo Google is using.

on the Net. On Yale’s Web site

So, I had to look this up.  ‘Web site’ is also an acceptable spelling.  But that is far from the popular (and also acceptable) use of both phrases, so it really makes the book look…well, rather fuddy-duddy.

Diana doesn’t find anything useful on the ‘official’ sites, or nothing that’s public anyway.

I had no luck imagining what Clairmont’s user name and password might be and was refused access to anything at all after my sixth incorrect guess.

Is this normal?  Do people just figure that trying to hack into another person’s account is part of a basic search on them?  Because that’s how it’s treated here.

Instead Diana goes looking up all his academic journal writings, and she finds a bunch of medical stuff, because he studies science and medicine and shit.  Then she feels it’s necessary to describe all his neuroscience stuff to us.  And that it’s necessary for her to read through all this.  How is it going to help her at all, when his academic credentials aren’t really the issue?

One of his studies is also about wolves in Norway.  An inordinate amount of time is spent on this.  Are we going to get werewolves in this book?

No scientist could produce this much work in so many different subdisciplines. Acquiring the skills alone would take more than a lifetime—a human lifetime, that is.

Why is this confusing you?  You specifically said that vampires usually go into science for this exact reason.  So they can follow experiments that take longer than a normal human lifetime. 

Although this brings up a different problem.  Anyone could notice that he’s been putting out papers for longer than the span of a normal career, and all under the same name, apparently.  Sure, Joe Shmoe isn’t going to be looking up science journals, but that’s a surprisingly close-knit community.  Other scientists are going to notice that his name is popping up more than it should.

Diana calls another scientist friend of hers named Chris.

“I heard you won another prize for your book. Congratulations!”

I’m getting pretty annoyed at hearing that she’s so fucking smart and special, when so far in this book we’ve just seen her be dull and unable to string two thoughts together.  It would be bad enough if she just said she was smart and left it, but no, we need a reminder that she’s award-winning smart every few pages. 

She tells Chris about ‘meeting someone’ and he immediately jumps on a romance assumption, because that’s all anyone cares about when talking to Diana.  Apparently she’s just not complete without a man, and everyone in her life is going to tell her so, no matter how shoe-horned in the conversation gets. 

Diana mentions Matthew’s name to him, and Chris immediately knows who she’s talking about, because Matthew is known in scientist circles.  And…no one else noticed that he’s been putting out papers for decades?  Why doesn’t Chris ask “Is he really over 100?” or something?  Instead he acts like he’s perfectly aware of Matthew’s work, but also perfectly aware that he’s a gorgeous 30-something.  Those two things cannot exist in the same space.

The book completely ignores the timeline of Matthew’s publications, despite Diana earlier saying that it couldn’t have taken place over a normal human’s lifespan.  They go merrily on talking about his work as if it all happened over the course of a decade or so.  Which one is the answer?

Beats the hell out of me, and I don’t think this book cares enough to realize it fucked that up.

Seems Matthew has been acting dodgy and anti-social lately.

“We get jumpy and weird. We hide in our labs and don’t go to conferences for fear we might say something and help someone else have a breakthrough.”

“You behave like wolves.” I now knew a great deal about wolves. The possessive, guarded behaviors Chris described fit the Norwegian wolf nicely.

I…just…what?  Wolves keep secrets from each other?

So, this whole conversation is just about what Matthew is like.  He’s a dismissive jerk who doesn’t seem to like women, avoids all people, has a temper, and is funded by lots of grants so he’s got oodles of money.  And that’s not my interpretation, that’s what they said about him.

And then at the end of it all, Chris still talks about it like he’s a viable romantic interest for Diana.  What the fuck, just because he’s hot?  By all accounts, he’s a terrible person, and also Diana has shown not a single ounce of romantic interest this whole time.  But there’s just no way that a woman could be interested in a man if it’s not romantic.

Beyond the obvious headdesking over the romance bullshit, this was seriously a whole chapter that was dedicated nothing but talking about Matthew’s character.  For serious, there was no plot here.  There was very little foreshadowing.  There was just a whole chapter of sitting around and talking about Matthew and how fucking smart and jerky he is.  This is terrible pacing, fluff, filler, and telling.