Rate: 3.5 stars out of 5
(This review may contain spoilers).
I think I’d give this book more like 3.5 stars out of 5. I didn’t feel it was necessary for the narration to keep switching between two different first person POVs and it was actually quite distracting… not to mention, there were a lot of ill-timed flashbacks that threw me out of the story while I tried to figure out exactly whereabouts in time I was.
I actually really liked the concept of this book and I thought Nina was an interesting character. I liked the fact that the book went straight into the action… and I felt that there was a lot of tension generated by the fact that Nina didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.
I actually wasn’t that keen on Warren as a character, separate from the switching to his perspective. Some of what he came out with, particularly towards the end, was especially creepy and I couldn’t really get behind the romance that developed between them, as although he was interested in Nina, there was nothing to indicate she was interested in him.
I was also a bit disappointed that some things didn’t pan out. I thought there was a lot of potential for twists that didn’t really go anywhere.
I really liked the fact that Nina was struggling with sleeping, but I would have liked to see some more of her struggling with something like addiction. It was implied in the narration that she wasn’t and I felt that she could have been easier to empathise with if she had been. It was also disappointing not to see more of her interactions with Kirby, as I felt she didn’t really spend much time with someone who was supposed to be her friend.
I think this book could have been expanded upon and while it was really good to be able to see Nina’s confusion and how what she’d seen had affected her for so long, a lot of the narration was a bit jarring in that there were random flashbacks/summaries of past events. This book had a lot of potential and I felt that there was only one way it could have ended… but I was left with very few answers and still a lot of confusion by the end.
I was raised in the wilds of New York by lovely, nonviolent parents who somehow never managed to prevent me from staying up late to read scary books. I now work at an alt-weekly newspaper in Vermont, where my favorite part of the job is, of course, reviewing scary books and movies. The Killer in Me is my first novel.
Ink of Blood 