Ink of Blood

(I received a free advance copy of this book in exchange for a review).

I have to admit, this book was very easy to read. It only took me a few hours to get through the whole thing…and the blurb had sounded really interesting. And I did find it quite easy to care about Amy as a character.

Unfortunately, the secondary characters in this book didn’t feel nearly as strong. I didn’t like the fact that all of the men were obsessed with Amy, and that all of the women (with one exception) seemed to hate/be insanely jealous of her. Even the parts of the book not written from Amy’s third person perspective basically had her be the main focus of everyone else’s world.

I think the two police officers could have been really interesting, but with the way that both were trying to warp the narrative (Brandon trying to make it fit Amy being innocent; Mindy trying to make the evidence fit Amy being the culprit). I also found the narration really hard to take seriously when one of the characters was written as literally ‘shaking her booty’. Unfortunately, that threw me straight out of the story and it took me a little while to be able to get back into it again.

Learning about Amy’s past gradually, through the course of the book, rather than all at once worked really well. I did feel bad about what she was going through and what she had gone through…and when it seemed like she’d found someone who would treat her well in the past, I was happy for her, despite knowing things were going to go very badly wrong.

I did figure out the truth behind the ‘friend’ who was messaging Amy fairly early on, although it was still good to see how the events unfolded in any case. And I did like how much Amy ended up second-guessing herself through the book. If there wasn’t the weird, obsessive, instant!love connection (at least on Brandon’s end), I would have liked reading the interactions between Amy and Brandon…although Brandon did seem to pick up a bit by the end of the book. Throughout most of the book, it was easy to suspend my disbelief, even though certain things that happened were a bit weird.

On the whole, this book was easy to read. I would recommend giving it a try if you enjoy reading thrillers and mysteries. Despite the issues I had with the secondary characters, I did keep reading to find out what would happen by the end. I wouldn’t read it a second time, but I think it was worth reading once.

So, this book was one that I decided to get (when I had an Amazon gift voucher) due to various people I knew online enjoying the book and telling me it was good.

I’m very glad I decided to give this book a chance. It was really easy to read, and Juliette was a character who was easy to empathise with. I thought the use of the strikethroughs to show how her thoughts were so chaotic was really unique…and while it did throw me a bit to have numbers written as numbers and not in words (2 instead of two, for instance), it didn’t take long for me to accept that as part of her character.

I wasn’t especially sold on the love triangle that was going on between Juliette, Adam and Werner. All three characters were interesting in their own right, even if Werner came across as a really sadistic, cruel person after trying to force Juliette to use her powers on a toddler. There were hints of more depth to him than how he immediately came across…though I really hope that if he becomes a good guy in later books, his refusal to accept the word ‘No’ is dealt with. Too many books have male characters forcing themselves on female characters and it’s not only treated as normal, but the woman suddenly realises it’s what she wanted all along (I’m looking at you, Carpathian series).

I really liked the fact that, while it was clear Juliette couldn’t actually touch anyone (or be touched by them), it wasn’t immediately clear just what her ability was until later in the book. And learning gradually about her history, not only with Adam but also with her parents and the other schoolchildren when she went to school, was a really good way of introducing her past…even if she did fall into a huge amount of cliches I’ve noticed with many heroines in young adult books.

I really liked Kenji’s character, and I would have liked to see a bit more of him rather than him appearing more towards the end. I really enjoyed his banter with Adam…but was far less sold on the apparent obsession he too developed with Juliette, constantly trying to flirt with her and hit on her. Yeah, he backed off once it was clear that Adam and Juliette was involved, but his refusal to take ‘I’m not interested,’ gracefully really soured my opinion of him as a character…and my view of this book as a whole, if I’m honest. I’m not a big fan of the overpowered woman who becomes the whole centre of every single character’s universe. I’m interested in seeing the world through a character’s eyes, not seeing every other character tell her what an amazing, powerful, ‘We need you so much!’ person she is. Conflicts make characters interesting. Not everyone has to love her and obsess mindlessly over her.

Wow, sorry. That went a bit more ranty than I was planning. Basically, if it wasn’t for everyone becoming so obsessed with Juliette, this book would be a solid four out of five stars. But making pretty much every person only think about her and want to get her, despite there being other people with abilities? Yeah, that’s dropped down the star rating.

I might give the next book in this series a try, but not if I’m going to be only reading about how much everyone wants to get their hands on her…both figuratively and literally. Unfortunately, this book just hit too many of those negative cliches for me by the end…and I’m so annoyed, because I would have enjoyed this so much otherwise.

I was a bit hesitant about buying this book, since even though my sister sent me the link and said, ‘I think this might be something you’d like,’ it was a bit more expensive for a book that was only 100 pages (more of a novella), and there were quite a few mixed reviews about it. But then I bought several books for my KIndle, and that included this book.

I did think that there was a lot of potential to this book. The cover was very striking, and the blurb sounded really intriguing.

Unfortunately, it was really hard to care about all of the characters except for Cat, who was the narrator. For most of the book, it felt like the events were happening in a dream…like it wasn’t really very real. Apart from Cat, the only character who had any real development was the ghost herself…who I felt sorry for the more I learned about her fate and how long she’d been waiting for, with the only company being of the sacrificed girls who wouldn’t be able to keep her warm for very long.

It did seem a bit much that all it took was Talia going to investigate a strange noise for Lin to start talking about horror movie cliches. Sometimes fourth wall breaks work, but this book wasn’t one of those times. And the random insertion about Cat being bisexual came completely out of left field, because the only time it was even mentioned was Lin saying it was why she’d be one of the first killed. Up until that point, it had just been made clear that she had romantic history with…well, all three of the guys in the group.

This book definitely could have done with being longer, allowing for the characters to be more developed. There was a lot of potential…and I did think that the scenes with Cat and the ghost were suitably creepy. I just wish that the other characters had been developed enough so that I’d actually care about what happened to them.

So, this book immediately grabbed my attention when I saw it in Asda, on the same shelf as A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. I bought it a few weeks later and started reading it and….

If I’m completely honest, this book didn’t really meet my expectations. I thought it had a lot of potential…and it was a book that was easy to read. I did like Monica’s character, and I felt bad for her that her mom was so traumatised by her oldest daughter’s death, it had a huge impact on her relationship with Monica. It broke my heart when Monica thought about how low she sat on her mother’s list of priorities, given that it was her younger brother’s birthday her mom used for her passwords.

I didn’t think that it was necessary to have the chapters from five years ago, written from Jen’s perspective. Honestly, those really threw me out of the story…and seemed wholly unnecessary, since anything that was revealed in Jen’s chapters was very quickly uncovered by Monica. And switching between first and third person is very jarring.

I was disappointed that, despite there being chemistry between them, nothing happened between Monica and Ginny. For a lot of the book, it felt like there was a buildup to them getting together…and I’m extremely disappointed this was ignored in favour of pushing Monica together with a guy who she barely seemed to know exist.

I did think there were too many threads in this book. They weren’t really woven together seamlessly; which makes sense, I guess. The tagline on the front of the book doesn’t really fit with anything that happened, though. ‘Five girls lied and five girls died’. The five girls dying is obvious. Those lying…well, I might be able to think of about three, maybe four, who were lying throughout the book. But there was too much going on for those dots to connect. I didn’t have the, ‘That makes sense’ moment when the truth was revealed. And honestly, the whole thing about Jen felt like it was just tacked on to explain what had happened.

This book had so much potential, but unfortunately for me, it just fell completely short. There was too much pushed into this book…and the ending really spoiled the whole thing for me. I might check out other books by this author in the future, but unfortunately, this one isn’t on my ‘read again’ list.

Compared to the previous two books in this series, I found this one took me more time to get through. I’m not sure why; maybe the events of book two had traumatised me in the same way they had Pip? That was one of the really good things about this book, I felt. It was really good, if heartbreaking, to see how badly Pip was affected by everything that happened…to the point of her having to go to a drug dealer just to get medication in order to be able to sleep.

I really liked the scenes of Pip and Ravi together. I honestly truly love their relationship; they’re so incredibly sweet together, and it’s really obvious that Ravi accepts Pip no matter what…and there’s no time more clear with that than reading towards the end of the book.

I found it interesting how Pip’s idea of ‘saving’ herself was to find a case that was more black and white, with no shades of grey. The previous two books did a really good job of showing the shades of grey in the cases in the previous books…and I liked the fact that this book not only came full circle with Andie’s involvement, but also allowed a deeper glimpse into her character and motivations. In this book, Andie was actually a character who I regretted not being able to learn more about in the first book.

It was a bit disappointing not to see as many of Pip’s notes and interview transcripts, which I thought worked so well in the previous two books. I did really like seeing Pip interacting with Nat, thogh, and them actually being friends by the time the third book came along. Nat was a character who really suffered in book one, only to have it all dredged up in the second book…and part of me felt that she got some closure in this third book. Plus, I liked seeing Cara appear more in this book, along with her sister…though I absolutely hated seeing Lauren and Anthony, who were almost worse than the killer in this book. After all, they accused Pip of making everything up about Jamie in book two…something that could have been extremely damaging to the whole case.

While this book was harder to read than the previous two, I still did find it good to read, although I ended the book with some very mixed feelings. Still, I’d say that it’s definitely worth reading. I love Pip and Ravi, and I’d love to read more books with them in. Plus, my understanding is that there will be a TV series of the books soon…and I definitely intend to watch that when it comes out.