Book Review

I just finished reading a Nook book and I'm so glad I didn't pick up the physical copy. If you haven't read these titles and want to, then don't read this as it will contain the obnoxious word known as spoiler. 

A Matter of Blood by S.P
It's a murder mystery/crime drama. Normally, I don't read these, they're not my genre. 

Plot: Detective Criminal Investigator Cass Jones has 2 murder cases he's working on, his personal life is in shambles but when things can't get worse, his younger brother, Christian snaps and kills his own wife and son then himself but Cass firmly disbelieves that his mild mannered bro would have murdered his own family. He tries to sort out the truth of his brother's homicide-suicide while being set up as the killer of his own brother while also being toyed with by the serial killer from one of his murder cases. 

That's the plot in my own words, it's written a lot better in the summary section of the book itself. I found it interesting with the family tied grief and mystery in there, so a genre I normally stay away from got read. The prologue was written very well, usually I skip those things cause in most books prologues are long and boring but I quite enjoyed it. My problem is, the prologue which is the point of view of the serial killer are the only parts in the entire damn thing that is written well. If the chapters were written like the POV of the killer, then this would have been a surprisingly good read instead of the mediocre disappointment that it was to me. 

My Nerd Like Problems with this book that has no real bearing on the story:

1.) It's a really slow start and it stay slows, the first couple of chapters are random profanity from the protagonist, Cass Jones. Personally, I'm a serious name nerd and I just don't like his name but that's my OCD and my dislike of the name has nothing to do with the story, that is a terribly unattractive name.
2.) This story takes place in jolly old London and is quite obnoxious with the meticulous naming of streets that I don't even know if it really exists in London or not. To me the telling of the streets Cass was driving on sounded like mindless bragging from the author, "like haha I live in London and you don't", ultimately I found it unnecessary. I don't care what streets he's driving on, get to the goddamn crime scene already! It was useless information that wasn't needed and now I see why professional editors get pissed about these types of things.
3.) Reading this has made me realize that I hate the British spellings of certain words. It seriously vexed me, I was looking up these words in the dictionary since I was sure the author had spelled them wrong.
4.) There's a lot of police abbreviations like DCI (detective of criminal investigations), ME (medical examiner) and countless others, and in my brain of useless knowledge, is not the terms of which these abbreviations stand for. I don't read crime or mystery so police jargon isn't something that I know. That's just me. 

Story Related (my personal opinion will be in italics)
Have to say, the most interesting thing in this book I found trying to discover was why Christian killed his own family then himself in chapter 5 because up until then, all we learn is why Cass is working two separate murder cases: one - a serial killer is targeting women, killing them and painting on them in blood: Nothing is Sacred, and the second case was two middle school boys were accidentally killed in a drive by meant for an Irish mobster. Cass is tormented by something that has happened in the past that has made other people treat him differently, you'll learn about the full story of his emotional anguish in later chapters but until you do, there are countless, annoying pointless references to it so you're basically reading the same emotional turmoil over and over whenever he thinks back. Those specific scenes of self loathing and pity could have been written differently, showing another side of his emotions and thoughts but unfortunately it really is the same scene repeated. I get it, his feelings never changed after this incident, he's still fucked up from it <---and that's how he describes it too but couldn't the author dive into a dictionary and choose some synonyms to describe it differently? Cass kept thinking the same shit, making him a 1 dimensional character and it doesn't really get better, he remains as 1 dimensional for the rest of the damn story. 

He has just gotten back together with his wife who is little more than a stranger to him and he often ponders throughout the story if he ever really knew her but he uses his work as an excuse to not talk to her. She wants to talk about the incident among other things he's done in the past but he doesn't want to face his demons and refuses to talk. I really felt like his wife should have just divorced his ass, he said he wanted to make things better but he puts in absolutely no effort and his wife has no real point or purpose until the very end, where yet again one of my predictions came true: she did have something to do with the death of his brother Christian. I hate it when I'm proved right. Predictable reads isn't good reading.

Aside from wifey issues at home, there is no evidence nor witnesses for his two murder cases until a video of the drive by is anonymously sent to his office to be later revealed was sent from a man called Mr. Bright. He has this tape in possession for the rest of the damn story but only makes head or tails during chapter 15 and at the very end, the Sergeant of Cass' criminal investigative area who is female, finally finds out something that I've been waiting for them to notice. And she gets killed for this little tidbit of information, Cass was set up as the killer of his own brother and his family and Sergeant Claire finds out who set him up. Her death was pointless! Especially since Cass finds the man who had set him up and gets him arrested anyway. Sergeant Claire is a character I have mixed feelings for: on one hand she's the stereotypical anime like female who's only role was to support the main character 100% of the time for no real reason other than that she and Cass had an affair once and everyone in the police station they work at knows it. Finding out that last bit of info is the only real police work she does in the entire damn story, everything else she did were leads and hints that Cass wanted her to check on for him. And here I thought she was his boss or was supposed to be. What I do like about her is that she's nothing like Cass who is a naive, self-centered, cynical 1 dimensional prick with a Cloud complex. Killing her was a surprise and a waste, her whole damn character was a waste. She could have been made better.
But before Claire dies, there's the conviction of the people who really caused the hit and run on the two middle school boys, everyone expected it had something to do with Irish mobster. Wrong! It was the boys' own fathers that caused their deaths due to money that they borrowed from the serial killer who had one condition upon giving each man some expensive amount of pounds. The boys' fathers had made some really bad investments and had gone broke, the condition for this luxurious generous loan was that the men tell the truth to their wives about their bad investments and stop their wives' over the top spending. Both men failed to do this so the killer told them they had a choice of who he was going to kill: their wives or their sons. Each man chose the other man's son to die in their own wives' place. This twist was something I thought was done well actually. Never saw that coming.
The elusive serial killer now has a name, MR. Solomon, Cass had believed the killer was another man named Castor Bright who sent him the video but had the two terribly confused, Mr. Solomon calls Cass' cellphone and tells him that Mr. Bright would love to find him too. He has his own POV scenes where he is murdering his victims or choosing them but for the most part, his POV are filled with his thoughts which were clearly meant to be philosophical and thought provoking and while I did like his personal scenes, his theology which was cut, paste & strangled Christian theology, that wasn't thought that well through. I got the gist of what the author wanted Mr. David Solomon to think and feel but she didn't express it quite clearly or strongly enough for me feel and want to understand anything Solomon was thinking, like the author was having trouble getting Solomon to have this strange profound theology. Personally I think he was a really cool character but the author's words were waning and lacking and I felt he was incomplete. The random bouts of Christianity whether or not the characters believed in it sickened me only because its been done a thousand times over. As a non-Christian myself, it infuriates me, like there's no other religion in the world people can dissect and use it as a motive for murder in a fictional book. Someone create a crime mystery where the killer is using Islamic virtues to kill innocent people, it might be more interesting, or better yet, Buddhism! It's another generic stereotype that I wish authors would stay away from.

Solomon kills himself the same way he killed his victims but it comes to no surprise, since he says it in the prologue, he was dying anyway. Now Mr. Bright is mentioned all through the book while Cass is investigating his brother's homicide-suicide on his own. His brother, Christian worked for this company simply called The Bank, and in this book, The Bank pretty much owns everybody whether they know it or not. Christian was an accountant and found numbers that didn't add up in several of the accounts which ultimately gets him and his family killed because surprise surprise, Cass was right all along, his bro did not commit homicide-suicide, they were murdered. But during his investigation, he discovered that his enigmatic Mr. Bright had known his parents and that Christian had become super paranoid before his death. The exact relation of Bright to his family goes unexplained because this is a series and this is book 1 but Cass did meet Mr. Bright who lives at The Bank, and it was the chapter that annoyed the fuck out of me. That entire chapter I found pointless, the book would have been all right without it. Mostly Cass just glared at Mr. Bright and asked questions in anger because he's a detective who doesn't carry a gun. At least punch Bright! Do something! Instead Mr. Bright answers him in riddles without giving any real answers at all and I didn't buy that scene at all. For all the anger Cass was supposed to have been feeling, I would have liked it if they got into a minor scuffle at least.This scene frustrated me, I was yelling at the Nook, why is it important you meet Mr. Bright here, now and worse you do nothing about it. To be honest, Mr. Bright is a character that was introduced to lead you away from the real killer Mr. Solomon, oh the two do know each other but Bright has nothing to do with Solomon's crimes. This scene was just poorly written.

In a round about way, I just told you this whole story. It had such good potential! Initially I liked the plot but it was written flatly, the characters are all 1 dimensional, there's a small tint of the supernatural going on in it that has little bearing but this is a series and this was book 1. I found the dead Christian and the mysteries he found to be the best thing about it, everyone else was pretty much useless. There's a lack of detail in every sentence, in every paragraph and Cass has the emotional range of a teaspoon. Cass struck me as very impressionable, I'm not sure if he was ever right material for undercover work where he killed some innocent kid, that was the incident that forever stained his soul. Cloud Strife and Sasuke complex. The epilogue to the end of this book just seemed like a flimsy way to make a sequel even if it's supposed to give him hope because everyone he ever cared for died. I don't like Cass as a protagonist and I don't feel bad that everyone he's ever loved died because he did fuck them all over then ignored them like it was their fault. Read it if you want to, decide for yourself.