Blood Trail

Blood Noun: 2

ISBN: 0-88677-502-7 Order from: Amazon.com

A dark fantasy with a hard-boiled female detective, aggressive repartee and some conflicts between law and justice.

Reviewed by David on November 25, 1998

Genre: Fantasy (Mystery, Vampires, Werewolves)

Synopsis: In a seemingly common world where vampires and other monsters hide behind the modern and multicultural life of Toronto, Vicki Nelson, a former police detective, is asked for help by a family of werewolves stalked by a murderous sniper.

Full Review: Vicki is an interesting character. A bright and capable detective, she is still bitter about the illness which forced her off the police force.

When urbanized Vicki leaves Toronto for the farm of sheep-herding werewolves, the annoyances of country life are complicated by her deteriorating sight and the jealousy of her friend and sometime lover Mike towards her new beau Henry Fitzgerald, the 450-year-old vampire who earns his living by writing bodice-ripper romances.

The mystery is pretty pedestrian, but the interactions of the characters, including the werewolves, and Vicki with her two boyfriends are engaging.

This series (started in Blood Price and continued in Blood Lines), is similar in setting to the Anita Blake novels. Huff's supernatural aspects a bit less solid than one might wish, and the histrionic argumentation between Vicki and Mike is slightly overdone.

Nevertheless, Vicki and her friends are well-drawn, behaving with all the passion, courage, pettiness and honesty of good but imperfect people under pressure. There is humor and lust, fear and pride in their actions, and the characters make this book an entertaining joy.

Overall: 6; Plot: 5.5; Characters: 6.5; Style: 6; World-building: 6; Originality: 7;

ISBN: 0-88677-502-7 Order from: Amazon.com