(I received this book for free as part of Goodreads First Reads giveaways).
(This review may contain spoilers).
I found this book a bit more entertaining than I’d expected to. Although it wasn’t quite as much of a murder mystery, I felt that the author did a good job of portraying the characters and their relationships and how they interacted with each other.
I found the supernatural elements to be quite intriguing and it would have been interesting to see that a bit more explored. It was only a minor thing, but I didn’t quite see how it all fit together. In some ways, the book made me think of a film called The Secret Craft, or so I recall.
The writing style was not really one that I like. I tend to prefer that an author choose a tense and person to write in and stick to it. Even changing from chapter to chapter makes a book quite hard for me to read. Stephen was a character who was easy to relate to, but I think the book would have worked just as well to have his parts in third person and the flashbacks to be in past tense.
I liked the friendship between Holly, Rebecca, Selena and Julia more than I thought I would. It was interesting to see Stephen change his approach depending on who he was talking to. The characters all obviously had something to hide, but I felt there were enough red herrings and loose ends that kept me reading throughout. And I did like how Stephen’s relationship with Conway developed. There was one scene in particular that really drew a sense of relief from me.
The culprit… I don’t think that was really handled that well. I didn’t have a, ‘Oh, that makes sense!’ moment when it was revealed. Actually, I felt it made very little sense, even with the flashbacks.
The relationships between the characters were probably the strongest point in this book. There were some really sweet moments and other scenes that drew a laugh from me. It was a bit difficult in that, out of the students, I felt that only eight characters had truly been fleshed out. Not enough of the others were shown to make me think there were a lot of students.
One thing I noticed that kept throwing me out of the story was the constant use of the word ‘but’ to end a sentence. Having it a couple of times would have worked quite well as sentence fragments… but not repeatedly. It was used in place of ‘however’ or ‘though’ and… doesn’t work in that way.
I felt the book was worth reading, but I don’t think it’s one I’d pick up and read again, though it’s possible I would pass it on to someone else to read. I’d probably look at other books by this author, but again, if I was going to pick up another one, I’d have to judge it on a book-by-book basis.
It’s worth noting that this book does have some more positive reviews, so if you’re interested in seeing what you think of the book – or just to read other reviews – you can check that here:
The Secret Place
Ink of Blood 